Tools to get a pictorial function call graph of code

Question

I have a large work space which has many source files of C code  Although I can see the functions called from a function in MS VS2005 using the Object browser  and in MSVC 6 0 also  this only shows functions called from a particular function in a non-graphical kind of display  Additionally  it does not show the function called starting from say main    and then the functions called from it  and so on  deeper inside to the leaf level function   I need a tool which will give me a function call graph pictorially with functions callee and caller connected by arrows or something like that  starting from main   to the last level of function  or at least showing a call graph of all functions in one C source file pictorially  It would be great if I could print this graph   Any good tools to do that  need not be free tools

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You may try CScope   tceetree   Graphviz

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Egypt  free software  ncc KcacheGrind  GPL  Graphviz  CPL  CodeViz  GPL

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Understand does a very good job of creating call graphs

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Dynamic analysis methods  Here I describe a few dynamic analysis methods   Dynamic methods actually run the program to determine the call graph   The opposite of dynamic methods are static methods  which try to determine it from the source alone without running the program   Advantages of dynamic methods    catches function pointers and virtual C   calls  These are present in large numbers in any non-trivial software    Disadvantages of dynamic methods    you have to run the program  which might be slow  or require a setup that you don t have  e g  cross-compilation only functions that were actually called will show  E g   some functions could be called or not depending on the command line arguments    KcacheGrind  https   kcachegrind github io html Home html  Test program   int f2 int i    return i   2    int f1 int i    return f2 2    i   1    int f0 int i    return f1 1    f2 2     int pointed int i    return i    int not called int i    return 0     int main int argc  char   argv        int   f  int       f0 1       f1 1       f   pointed      if  argc    1          f 1       if  argc    2          not called 1       return 0      Usage   sudo apt-get install -y kcachegrind valgrind    Compile the program as usual  no special flags  gcc -ggdb3 -O0 -o main -std c99 main c    Generate a callgrind out  lt PID gt  file  valgrind --tool callgrind   main    Open a GUI tool to visualize callgrind data  kcachegrind callgrind out 1234   You are now left inside an awesome GUI program that contains a lot of interesting performance data   On the bottom right  select the  Call graph  tab  This shows an interactive call graph that correlates to performance metrics in other windows as you click the functions   To export the graph  right click it and select  Export Graph   The exported PNG looks like this     From that we can see that    the root node is  start  which is the actual ELF entry point  and contains glibc initialization boilerplate f0  f1 and f2 are called as expected from one another pointed is also shown  even though we called it with a function pointer  It might not have been called if we had passed a command line argument  not called is not shown because it didn t get called in the run  because we didn t pass an extra command line argument    The cool thing about valgrind is that it does not require any special compilation options   Therefore  you could use it even if you don t have the source code  only the executable   valgrind manages to do that by running your code through a lightweight  virtual machine   This also makes execution extremely slow compared to native execution   As can be seen on the graph  timing information about each function call is also obtained  and this can be used to profile the program  which is likely the original use case of this setup  not just to see call graphs  How can I profile C   code running on Linux   Tested on Ubuntu 18 04   gcc -finstrument-functions   etrace  https   github com elcritch etrace  -finstrument-functions adds callbacks  etrace parses the ELF file and implements all callbacks   I couldn t get it working however unfortunately  Why doesn  39 t  -finstrument-functions  work for me   Claimed output is of format    -- main      -- Crumble make apple crumble          -- Crumble buy stuff              -- Crumble buy              -- Crumble buy              -- Crumble buy              -- Crumble buy              -- Crumble buy          -- Crumble prepare apples              -- Crumble skin and dice          -- Crumble mix          -- Crumble finalize              -- Crumble put              -- Crumble put          -- Crumble cook              -- Crumble put              -- Crumble bake   Likely the most efficient method besides specific hardware tracing support  but has the downside that you have to recompile the code

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Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit has static control dataflow points-to call graph analysis that has been applied to huge systems    25 million lines  of C code  and produced such call graphs  including functions called via function pointers

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You can check out my bash-based C call tree generator here  It lets you specify one or more C functions for which you want caller and or called information  or you can specify a set of functions and determine the reachability graph of function calls that connects them    I e  tell me all the ways main    foo    and bar   are connected  It uses graphviz dot for a graphing engine

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Astr  e is the most robust and sophisticated tool out there  IMHO

[c] Tools to get a pictorial function call graph of code

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