This is automated checker to make sure a C++ file follows Google's C++ style guide (http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml). As it heavily relies on regular expressions, cpplint.py won't catch all violations of the style guide and will very occasionally report a false positive. There is a list of things we currently don't handle very well at the top of cpplint.py, and we welcome patches to improve it. The linting tool takes a list of files as input. For full usage instructions, please see the output of: ./cpplint.py --help Unit tests are provided in cpplint_unittest.py. This file can safely be ignored by end users who have downloaded this package and only want to run the lint tool. cpplint.py and its corresponding unit tests are Copyright (C) 2009 Google Inc. It is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or b) the "Artistic License".