clangformat

Simple BASH script to recursively clang-format a source tree, with option to ignore/exclude files.

Rationale

I wanted a quick and easy way to clang-format my source trees, whilst excluding certain files easily. I saw a lot of repos including a .clang-format-ignore file, but I could not work out how to use one with the clang-format provided by homebrew.

Setup

edit clangformat so that CLANGFMT points to where ever clang-format is located on your system (by default it's set to where clang-format is installed under macOS using homebrew), make sure it is executable (chmod +x clangformat) and place it somewhere in your $PATH (or update your $PATH accordingly).

Usage

clangformat --help for usage details.

clangformat <directory> --test

• show which files will be formatted in <directory>.
• it is advisable to run this once to decide which files should be added to .clang-format-ignore before actually formatting the source tree.

clangformat <directory>

• format in place (clang-format -i) using the style defined in .clang-format recursively through <directory>.
• e.g. clangformat Source

Excluding files

.clang-format-ignore

• should be in the same directory that you issue clangformat from.
• should contain one per line examples of files to ignore, * wildcards are allowed.
• start a line with # for comments.
• e.g. *sqlite3.* would match Source/util/sqlite3.c and Source/libs/include/sqlite3.h

Contributing

I'm sure this could be improved upon, my BASH chops aren't all that amazing, but this works for me, so I wanted to share it! I wouldn't be surprised if it was hugely inefficient on large code bases. It could almost certainly be improved by being made more flexible. Another improvement would be to search upwards in the directory hierarchy for the .clang-format-ignore file the same way that clang-format searches for .clang-format if not present in the current directory. PRs gladly accepted.