NAME

       licensecheck - simple license checker for source files

SYNOPSIS

       licensecheck --help|--version

       licensecheck [--no-conf] [--verbose] [--copyright] [-l|--lines=N] [-i|--ignore=regex]
       [-c|--check=regex] [-m|--machine] [-r|--recursive] list of files and directories to check

DESCRIPTION

       licensecheck attempts to determine the license that applies to each file passed to it, by
       searching the start of the file for text belonging to various licenses.

       If any of the arguments passed are directories, licensecheck will add the files contained
       within to the list of files to process.

OPTIONS

       --verbose, --no-verbose
           Specify whether to output the text being processed from each file before the
           corresponding license information.

           Default is to be quiet.

       -l=N, --lines=N
           Specify the number of lines of each file's header which should be parsed for license
           information. (Default is 60).

       -i=regex, --ignore=regex
           When processing the list of files and directories, the regular expression specified by
           this option will be used to indicate those which should not be considered (e.g. backup
           files, VCS metadata).

       -r, --recursive
           Specify that the contents of directories should be added recursively.

       -c=regex, --check=regex
           Specify a pattern against which filenames will be matched in order to decide which
           files to check the license of.

           The default includes common source files.

       --copyright
           Also display copyright text found within the file

       -m, --machine
           Display the information in a machine readable way, i.e. in the form
           <file><tab><license>[<tab><copyright>] so that it can be easily sorted and/or
           filtered, e.g. with the awk and sort commands.  Note that using the --verbose option
           will kill the readability.

       --no-conf, --noconf
           Do not read any configuration files. This can only be used as the first option given
           on the command line.

CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

       The two configuration files /etc/devscripts.conf and ~/.devscripts are sourced by a shell
       in that order to set configuration variables.  Command line options can be used to
       override configuration file settings.  Environment variable settings are ignored for this
       purpose.  The currently recognised variables are:

       LICENSECHECK_VERBOSE
           If this is set to yes, then it is the same as the --verbose command line parameter
           being used. The default is no.

       LICENSECHECK_PARSELINES
           If this is set to a positive number then the specified number of lines at the start of
           each file will be read whilst attempting to determine the license(s) in use.  This is
           equivalent to the --lines command line option.

LICENSE

       This code is copyright by Adam D. Barratt <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk>, all rights reserved;
       based on a script of the same name from the KDE SDK, which is copyright by
       <dfaure@kde.org>.  This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.  You are free to
       redistribute this code under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or
       later.

AUTHOR

       Adam D. Barratt <adam@adam-barratt.org.uk>