How to Launch the PVS-Studio Analyzer

Jun 25 2015

Author: Andrey Karpov

Every now and then, we receive e-mails reading something like "After I have installed the analyzer, I find the PVS-Studio.exe file, launch it, but it wouldn't work". Since these are not rare, single cases, I think we should clarify on the subject.

So, some users try to launch PVS-Studio.exe to check their project. This is an incorrect way of using the tool. PVS-Studio.exe is the analyzer kernel which receives lots of input parameters and generates a "raw" log with the warnings as its output.

PVS-Studio.exe is not intended for "manual launch"; it is a command-line utility used by the other components of the tool.

Project analysis can be done in a number of ways:

You can launch the Visual Studio IDE with the analyzer plugin integrated into it. This plugin allows easy analysis and convenient log management. It collects all the necessary information by itself and passes it into PVS-Studio.exe. This is the traditional and simplest way of using our code analyzer. To find out more about the plugin interface, see the article: PVS-Studio for Visual C++.
If your project is compiled in a complicated way (for example you use makefile or your own build system), you should use the PVS-Studio Standalone application. This program can track compiler launches and collect all the necessary information to perform the analysis. To find out more about PVS-Studio Standalone, refer to the documentation.
In the most specific, rare cases, you can integrate a PVS-Studio.exe launch from makefile by yourself. To learn how to do that, see the documentation. But keep in mind that this is a complicated approach we do not recommend. In almost every case, projects can be analyzed without launching PVS-Studio.exe manually.

Good luck with analysis! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us, we will be glad to help you.