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Is there a way for gcov to provide coverage analysis of a shared library without executable

+1 vote
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Is there a way for gcov to provide coverage analysis of a shared library without building the main() program that uses the shared library?

I have external users of the library that have their own executable programs that use the library and I need to test code coverage with those programs but I do not have access to their source code.

posted Sep 3, 2013 by Ahmed Patel

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1 Answer

+1 vote

Do you mean, you have a .so shared library and you don't have an executable using the same library right? if yes then answer is no. I mean you should have an executable using the library and set of test cases or you need to run the executable to find the coverage.

And i guess the shared library has to be compiled with gcov library support.

answer Sep 10, 2013 by Nagaraja Sadar
Thanks Nagaraja, I got the answer have to have executable for this purpose. Thanks for showing the interest in my problem.
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+2 votes

I need to use gcov to test coverage of a shared library where I have ownership of the source code for the library, but I do not have the source code for the executable test program that uses the library. Is there a way for gcov to provide coverage analysis of a shared library without building the main() program that uses the shared library?

All the examples I have seen show the main() program is built with gcov. I have used gcov to build the .gcno files that correspond to the .so file. I have been able to use gcov to build a test program that I have source code for that uses the shared library and get it to generate execution trace .gcda files for the shared library objects.

However, I have external users of the library that have their own executable programs that use the library and I need to test code coverage with those programs but I do not have access to their source code.

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