[cdt-dev] Question about external checkers (codan)

[Alex Ruiz <alruiz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

I'm new to CDT and Eclipse plug-in development in general. I've been reading through the mailing list trying to find information about writing codan external checkers (I started with this great presentation: http://wiki.eclipse.org/images/f/f9/CodanCDTSummit2010.pdf .)

What I need to do is write a codan external checker that calls a command-line tool, then parse the output somehow and map it to actual warnings/errors in Eclipse. The part that I haven't found answers for is how to call the external command-line tool.

In one of the messages, the ETF (PTP's External Tool Framework - http://wiki.eclipse.org/PTP/ETFw/PTP_External_Tools_Framework ) is mentioned. I looked into it and, IMHO, it seems great if I want to generate a UI where users can enter some parameters for the tool. In my case, I just want to call the tool, passing parameters (if any) myself, without showing any UI. For my use case, ETF seems an overkill.

I also googled around and found this little gem: cppcheclipse ( http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/cppcheclipse/ .) It does something similar to what I want to do, but 1. It doesn't use codan and 2. it uses apache-commons-exec for launching the command-line tool (something that is a no-no for my project.)

Any help on how I can launch a command-line tool, without any UI, as a external checker, will be greatly appreciated :)

Many thanks in advance,

-Alex