How to call clang-format over a cpp project folder?

Question

Is there a way to call something like clang-format --style=Webkit for an entire cpp project folder, rather than running it separately for each file?

I am us

Answer 1

Here is a solution that searches recursively and pipes all files to clang-format as a file list in one command. It also excludes the "build" directory (I use CMake), but you can just omit the "grep" step to remove that.

shopt -s globstar extglob failglob && ls **/*.@(h|hpp|hxx|c|cpp|cxx) | grep -v build | tr '\n' ' ' | xargs clang-format -i

Answer 2

Unfortunately, there is no way to apply clang-format recursively. *.cpp will only match files in the current directory, not subdirectories. Even **/* doesn't work.

Luckily, there is a solution: grab all the file names with the find command and pipe them in. For example, if you want to format all .h and .cpp files in the directory foo/bar/ recursively, you can do

find foo/bar/ -iname *.h -o -iname *.cpp | xargs clang-format -i

See here for additional discussion.

Answer 3

I recently found a bash-script which does exactly what you need:

https://github.com/eklitzke/clang-format-all

This is a bash script that will run clang-format -i on your code.

Features:

• Finds the right path to clang-format on Ubuntu/Debian, which encode the LLVM version in the clang-format filename
• Fixes files recursively
• Detects the most common file extensions used by C/C++ projects

On Windows, I used it successfully in Git Bash and WSL.

Answer 4

I'm using the following command to format all objective-C files under the current folder recursively:

$ find . -name "*.m" -o -name "*.h" | sed 's| |\\ |g' | xargs clang-format -i

I've defined the following alias in my .bash_profile to make things easier:

# Format objC files (*.h and *.m) under the current folder, recursively
alias clang-format-all="find . -name \"*.m\" -o -name \"*.h\" | sed 's| |\\ |g' | xargs clang-format -i"

Answer 5

In modern bash you can recursively crawl the file tree

for file_name in ./src/**/*.{cpp,h,hpp}; do
    if [ -f "$file_name" ]; then
        printf '%s\n' "$file_name"
        clang-format -i $file_name
    fi
done

Here the source is assumed to be located in ./src and the .clang-format contains the formatting information.

Answer 6

For the Windows users: If you have Powershell 3.0 support, you can do:

Get-ChildItem -Path . -Directory -Recurse |
    foreach {
        cd $_.FullName
        &clang-format -i -style=WebKit *.cpp
    }

Note1: Use pushd . and popd if you want to have the same current directory before and after the script

Note2: The script operates in the current working directory

Note3: This can probably be written in a single line if that was really important to you