FCHK

An LLVM FileCheck clone with a terser syntax.

Like FileCheck, this is a tool aimed at testing that text output matches certain patterns. It supports most of the features that FileCheck does, but with a terser syntax. fchk provides features that make it easier to use regular expressions without having to wrap them in [[]] or {{}}.

Design note: While e.g. * and + may be less obvious than CHECK and CHECK-NEXT if you’re not used to either tool, once you’ve written CHECK-NEXT 200 times, you’ll probably prefer +—at least I did.

There a lot more differences between fchk and FileCheck than just that; for more information, check out the examples file, which showcases most of the features of fchk. You can try modifying a few lines and running fchk test/basic.txt to see what happens.

To run the program, simply add some tests (and a R directive) to a file, and run fchk on it.

This program runs on Linux and Windows, though it is mainly developed on Linux. MacOS should work but is untested. Building with MSVC is supported.

Build

This program uses CMake and requires an up-to-date C++23 compiler. Dependencies (mostly PCRE2) are downloaded automatically. To build it, just add it as a subdirectory to your CMake project or build it separately by invoking CMake as usual:

$ cmake -B build
$ cmake --build build -- -j`nproc`

CMake Integration

fchk provides a CMake function that makes it easy to run tests using CTest. If you’re building fchk yourself as part of your project, just add the following lines to your CMakeLists.txt:

include(CTest)
set(FCHK_FORCE_RELEASE ON) # Always build fchk in Release mode.
add_subdirectory(fchk)
FCHKAddAllTestsInDir(
    IN tests more_tests
    PATTERN "*.foo" "*.bar"
    PREFIX "#"
    WORKING_DIRECTORY "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}"
    ARGS --first --second --third
    RECURSIVE
)

If you’re not building fchk yourself, then you only need to have a copy of cmake/FCHKDiscoverTests.cmake on your system, include it in your CMakeLists.txt, and then use the FCHKAddAllTestsInDir function as above.

In this example, we’re collecting tests in the directories tests and more_tests, matching files with the extension .foo and .bar, and passing the arguments --first --second --third to fchk. We’re also setting the fchk directive prefix to # and the working directory to the project root. Finally, the RECURSIVE option tells fchk to recurse into subdirectories.

See also the aforementioned CMake file for more information.