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As shown in the previous chapters, GNU cflow offers a
rich set of options for fine tuning its operation (See Complete Listing of cflow Options.,
for a full list). You will likely use some of them frequently,
while using others only from time to time, if at all.
To facilitate its use, GNU cflow provides a notion of
profiles. A profile is a text file containing a set of often
used command line options. The option --profile=name
instructs cflow to read the options from the file
name. If the file does not exist, the program will look for
file name.cfo5 in a predefined set of directories,
called profile search path. By default, these are:
where pkgdatadir is package data directory, defined when compiling the package. Normally it is /usr/share/cflow or /usr/local/share/cflow.
To see the actual search path value, run cflow --help.
The value is shown near the end of its output.
The search path can be modified from the command line. The option --prepend-path=dir adds directory dir at the beginning of the search path.
The syntax of a profile is fairly simple: options are separated by any amount of whitespace characters (including newlines). Comments are introduced by a hash sign and extend to the end of line. For example:
# Sources use gcc extensions --profile=gcc # Request brief output --brief # Preprocess sources --cpp='cc -E' -DHAVE_CONFIG_H
The file name default.cfo is special: this file is a
default profile. At startup, cflow looks for it in
the search path and, if found, loads it before processing any command
line options. There are, however, two notable exceptions: options
--prepend-path and -q (see below) are always
processed first, even before loading the default profile, no matter
where they are placed in the command line.6
The -q option mentioned above disables loading the default profile.
It may sometimes be necessary to cancel the effect of a command
line option. For example, you might specify --brief in your
profile, but then occasionally need to obtain verbose graph. To
cancel the effect of any GNU cflow option that does not take
arguments, prepend ‘no-’ to the corresponding long option name.
Thus, specifying --no-brief cancels the effect of the
previous --brief option.
The profile suffix is an abbreviation of cflow options.
The special nature of these two command line options means also that they are meaningless if used in profiles. If used in a profile, these two options are silently ignored.
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