cscope was originally written at AT&T Bell Labs for use with the C programming language. Cscope takes a collection of files and builds a database of information that is used to answer questions about the source code. The database contains a cross reference of all the symbols in the code including function call names, and global variables. The program can run in an interactive or batch mode. In batch mode cscope builds the cross reference and then exits, leaving the cross reference files in the current working directory. For large collections of source code it is best to run cscope periodically as building the cross reference takes some time. Once the cross reference has been built the program can start an interactive session in which the user enters different queries.
To build the index do:
cd <your source directory>
cscope -R -b -q
To use the program with a pre-built database
cscope -d
Platforms: All Unix, Win32
Location: cscope