Simian Documentation

Command Line Interface

Simian's command line interface allows you to run it from a shell, shell script, or batch file, scanning a directory for all files matching a pattern.

The general form for the Java version is: java -jar simian.jar [options] [files]

The files can be specified as any regular shell glob or simply a list of files and can be mixed with the -includes option. (See below for examples.)

For example, to find all java files in all sub-directories of the current directory: "**/*.java"

To find all java files in the current directory and set the threshold to 3: -threshold=3 "*.java"

To find all C# files in the current directory: "*.cs"

To find all C and header in all sub-directories of the current directory: **/*.c **/*.h

To find all java files in two different directories: "/csharp-source/*.cs" "/java-source/*.java"

To find all java files in all sub-directories, excluding Test classes: -includes=**/*.java -excludes=**/*Test.java

To find all java files in the current directory and ignore numbers: -ignoreNumbers "*.java"

To find all Ruby files and display the results in xml format: -formatter=xml "*.rb"

To find all Ruby files and sends the results in emacs compatible format to a file: -formatter=emacs:c:\temp\simian.log "*.rb"

To read configuration from a file (where each line of the file specifies at most one of any of the valid command-line arguments): -config=simian.config

Notes

The default VM size seems to be adequate for most projects. If you encounter the following error you will need to increase the VM heap size using the -mx JVM option.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

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Ant Task

This method allows you to integrate Simian with Apache Ant™, a java based build tool.

Somewhere in your build.xml file, define the task:

<taskdef resource="simiantask.properties" classpath="simian.jar"/>

And finally, create a target to run the checker. For all defaults:

<simian>  
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.java"/>
</simian>

To exclude test classes if they exists in the same tree as the source:

<simian threshold="6">
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.java" excludes="**/*Test.java"/>
</simian>

To change the minimum number of lines that is considered a match:

<simian threshold="6">
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.java"/>
</simian>

To force the language used for processing:

<simian language="java">
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.*"/>
</simian>

To have the build fail one or more matches are found:

<simian failOnDuplication="true">
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.java"/>
</simian>

To set a build property if one or more matches are found:

<simian failureProperty="test.failure">
  <fileset dir="${src.main.dir}" includes="**/*.java"/>
</simian>

By default, Simian outputs plain text using the default Ant logger. You can override this by using the nested formatter element. The formatter takes a type (either "plain"; "xml"; "emacs"; "vs"; or "yml") and an optional filename (toFile). For example, to send output to a file:

<simian>
  <formatter type="plain" toFile="simian-log.txt"/>
</simian>

To produce XML output:

<simian>
  <formatter type="xml" toFile="simian-log.xml"/>
</simian>

You may specify any number of formatter elements allowing you to produce both XML and plain text output if necessary.