DESCRIPTION

creduce 2.5.0 (18e04be) -- a C and C++ program reducer

C-Reduce requires an "interestingness test" and one or more files to reduce, which must be writable. The interestingness test is an executable program (usually a shell script) that returns 0 when a partially reduced file is interesting (a candidate for further reduction) and returns non-zero when a partially reduced file is not interesting (not a candidate for further reduction -- all uninteresting files are discarded).

C-Reduce runs the interestingness test in a fresh temporary directory containing only the partially reduced file(s). Thus, when the interestingness test examines a partially reduced file, it must do so using a relative path to the current working directory. On the other hand, when the interestingness test refers to any file that is not being reduced, this should be done using an absolute path.

The interestingness test should not expect any command line arguments. It should be deterministic and might want to enforce resource limits on sub-commands that it invokes (e.g. using ulimit). In particular, C-Reduce is known to sometimes introduce an infinite loop into the program being reduced. Therefore, if the interestingness test runs the compiled program, it probably should do so under a timeout.

As a quick example, if you consider a file to be interesting if GCC's vectorizer fires while compiling it, you might use this interestingness test:

gcc -w -O3 foo.c -S && grep xmm foo.s

To see if your interestingness test is working, try running these commands:

DIR=`mktemp -d` cp file_to_reduce [optionally, more files to reduce] $DIR cd $DIR ,/path/to/interestingness_test/ echo $?

This should result in "0" being echoed to the terminal. If this does not happen, the interestingness test is flawed and C-Reduce won't be able to make use of it.

If you haven't written an interestingness test before, please refer to this tutorial for additional guidance:

https://embed.cs.utah.edu/creduce/using/

If at all possible, run C-Reduce on preprocessed code, generated for example using:

gcc -E -P file.c

If you cannot reduce preprocessed code, you can either reduce just the non-preprocessed file or else perform a multi-file reduction on the file and its transitive includes (or any subset of them). In the first case you need to set the CREDUCE_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable to a colonseparated list of include directories in order for clang_delta to find them.

If your interestingness test involves a cross compiler and the characteristics of the cross target differs from the host you will need to set CREDUCE_TARGET_TRIPLE to match the cross target. This is particularly important if you are working with non-preprocessed code and use CREDUCE_INCLUDE_PATH.

Press "s" at any time to skip to the next pass (this feature is disabled unless the Perl module Term::ReadKey is available on your system).

Summary of options:

--add-pass <pass> <sub-pass> <priority>

Add the specified pass to the schedule

--also-interesting <exitcode>

A process exit code (somewhere in the range 64-113 would be usual) that, when returned by the interestingness test, will cause C-Reduce to save a copy of the variant [default: -1]

--debug

Print debug information

--die-on-pass-bug

Terminate C-Reduce if a pass encounters an otherwise non-fatal problem

--max-improvement <bytes>

Largest improvement in file size from a single transformation that C-Reduce should accept (useful only to slow C-Reduce down)

--n <N>

Number of cores to use; C-Reduce tries to automatically pick a good setting but its choice may be too low or high for your situation [default: 2]

--no-default-passes

Start with an empty pass schedule

--no-give-up

Don't give up on a pass that hasn't made progress for 50000 iterations

--nokill

Wait for parallel instances to terminate on their own instead of killing them (only useful for debugging)

--print-diff

Show changes made by transformations, for debugging

--sanitize

Attempt to obscure details from the original source file

--save-temps

Don't delete ,/tmp/creduce-xxxxxx/ directories on termination

--shaddap

Suppress output about non-fatal internal errors

--skip-initial-passes

Skip initial passes (useful if input is already partially reduced)

--skip-key-off

Disable skipping the rest of the current pass when "s" is pressed

--sllooww

Try harder to reduce, but perhaps take a long time to do so

--tidy

Do not make a backup copy of each file to reduce as file.orig

--timing

Print timestamps about reduction progress

usage: creduce [options] interestingness_test file_to_reduce [optionally, more files to reduce]

creduce --help for more information