5 Jul 2008 muks   » (Master)

Some cool programmer software

Here are some more software programs for Linux that you may find useful. I used most of them at my last place of work.

  • Coverity Prevent is a non-free static analysis tool for C and C++ similar to lint and Sparse, which has a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio. It checks and catches many programming errors, along with the the occasional false positives. It's a good tool to have around if your company can afford it. Sparse is also useful with a lot of C programs.
  • If you are a Git user, msmtp is something that you can use as a helper to git-send-email which lets you send email through a SMTP server that only does TLS.
  • If you are an Emacs user working with projects in C and C++, you probably already know of the wonderful (and non-free) Xrefactory, a source code navigation and refactoring tool. I had looked for something which came close to IntelliSense and Visual Assist X on Linux, and Xrefactory is it. The commercial version is much better than the $free version if you're gonna try it. The program's maintainer has expressed a willingness to release the $free version under a free software license if someone wants to package it for Debian. Also, Cscope with the xcscope.el module is also pretty decent, but it won't navigate in scope the way Xrefactory will.
  • Wireshark rules! You already know that if you are a network programmer, but even the web browsing user can get a lot of bang from it. For example, you have this Flash object on a website that downloads some data (.flv?) from the web server. You want to know what URL it's accessing for it. Or you want to get at a URL (to download it using curl) that is constructed by JavaScript and works only when the web browser also sends several cookies along. You can find out all this information by doing a packet capture using Wireshark and parsing what you've captured. Wireshark breaks the packets up into protocol specific layers with plenty of annotations. EFF has an article on how you can detect packet spoofing by ISPs, using Wireshark. Wireshark does suffer from slow parsing issues if you're working with multi-million-frame captures. Its filter expression syntax is also pretty basic. Implementing indexing of pcap files will probably help it with the speed issue. Scapy is another useful tool that lets you interactively construct and deconstruct packets.

Syndicated 2008-07-05 02:36:00 from Mukund's blog

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