reuse - Man Page

reuse [options] <command>

reuse is a helper tool for the REUSE initiative. Its main functionality in reuse-lint(1) is to verify whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification. It also contains an array of convenience functions to enable developers to become compliant.

For more information on how to use reuse beyond a reference of the command-line options, see the accompanying documentation or read it at https://reuse.readthedocs.io. For further information about REUSE, see https://reuse.software.

When searching for copyright and licensing tags inside of files, the tool does not strictly limit itself to the header comment as prescribed by the specification. It searches the first 4 kibibytes of the file for REUSE information, whether in comments or not. This makes sure that the tool can parse any type of plain-text file, even if the comment style is not recognised.

If a file is found to have an unparsable tag, that file is not parsed at all. This is a bug (https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool/issues/4).

The tool does not verify the correctness of copyright notices. If it finds any line containing '©', 'Copyright', or 'SPDX-FileCopyrightText:', then the tag and everything following it is considered a valid copyright notice, even if the copyright notice is not compliant with the specification.

Symbolic links and files that are zero-sized are automatically ignored.

--debug

Enable debug logging.

--suppress-deprecation

Hide deprecation warnings.

--include-submodules

Do not ignore Git submodules; they are treated as though they are part of the project. This is not strictly compliant with the specification.

--include-meson-subprojects

Do not ignore Meson subprojects (i.e. the subprojects directory in the root of the project); they are treated as though they are part of the project. This is not strictly compliant with the specification.

--no-multiprocessing

Disable multiprocessing performance enhancer. This may be useful when debugging.

--root PATH

Set the root of the project to PATH. Normally this defaults to the root of the current working directory's VCS repository, or to the current working directory.

-h,  --help

Display help and exit. If no command is provided, this option is implied.

--version

Display the version and exit.

reuse-annotate(1)

Add REUSE information to files.

reuse-convert-dep5(1)

Convert .reuse/dep5 to REUSE.toml.

reuse-download(1)

Download license files.

reuse-lint(1)

Verify whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification.

reuse-spdx(1)

Generate SPDX bill of materials.

reuse-supported-licenses(1)

Print a list of supported licenses.

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