note

- specify legal annotations

Synopsis

/usr/lib/note

Description

Each file in this directory contains the NOTE (also _NOTE) annotations legal for a single tool. The name of the file, by convention, should be the tool vendor's stock name, followed by a hyphen, followed by the tool name. For example, for Sun's lock_lint tool the filename should be SUNW-lock_lint.

The file should contain the names of the annotations understood by the tool, one per line. For example, if a tool understands the following annotations:

NOTE(NOT_REACHED)
NOTE(MUTEX_PROTECTS_DATA(list_lock, list_head))

then its file in /usr/lib/note should contain the entries:

NOT_REACHED
MUTEX_PROTECTS_DATA

Blank lines, and lines beginning with a pound (#), are ignored.

While /usr/lib/note is the default directory tools search for such files, they can be made to search other directories instead simply by setting environment variable NOTEPATH to contain the paths, separated by colons, of directories to be searched, e.g., /usr/mytool/note:/usr/lib/note.

Usage

These files are used by such tools whenever they encounter NOTEs they do not understand. If a file in /usr/lib/note contains the annotation, then it is valid. If no such file contains the annotation, then the tool should issue a warning complaining that it might be invalid.

Environment Variables

NOTEPATH

specify paths to be searched for annotation files. Paths are separated by colons (“:”).

See Also

NOTE(3EXT)