Home Blogs Books NewTab rsrc

C coding styles

programming c

Code Indentation and style guidelines

The indent program changes the appearance of a C program by inserting or deleting whitespace. The indent program can be used to make code easier to read. It can also convert from one style of writing C to another. indent understands a substantial amount about the syntax of C, but it also attempts to cope with incomplete and misformed syntax.

GNU indent is available for linux distributions and can be simply installed using the indent package.

The common syntax for it can be one among the following :-

indent [options] [input-files]
indent [options] [single-input-file] [-o output-file]
indent --version

The different style formats which we can format our code are :-

Coding style flags details
GNU style no flag/-gnu The GNU coding style is that preferred by the GNU project. Available with no flag.
The Kernighan & Ritchie style -kr The Kernighan & Ritchie style is used throughout their well-known book The C Programming Language.
The Berkeley style -orig The original Berkeley coding style was featured in most of the code in the BSD Unix
The Linux Style -linux The Linux style is used in the linux kernel code and drivers. Includes saner formatting and is generally recommended.

Apart from the predesigned code styles, you can generate your own code style or make it follow a specific pattern using the following options, read on.

Blank lines

Flag Effect Revert with
-bad Forces a blank line after every block of declarations -nbad
-bap Forces a blank line after every procedure body -nbap
-bbb Forces a blank line before every boxed comment -nbbb
-sob Causes indent to swallow optional blank lines -nsob

Comments

To be continued...


Learn Lisp with me - 2
Common systemd-boot issues and how to fix them