copyright-updater

Updates the copyright years in source code files.

What It Does

Say you have a copyright string in the top of some source file, like:

# Copyright © 2010 John Doe <john@example.com>

If you edit this file, you would like the copyright notice so reflect the current year as well, like:

# Copyright © 2010, 2012 John Doe <john@example.com>

This script checks for outdated copyright strings and updates them.

Ranges are detected and collapsed intelligently. If you have 2008, 2009, 2010, it will become 2008-2010. If you mix ranges and single years, this will also be picked up correctly:

2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2012

That list becomes:

2002-2004, 2006, 2008-2009, 2012

In order to prevent changing of copyright notices that do not carry your name, you can create an INI style configuration file at ~/.config/copyright_updater.ini which would look like that:

[name]
name = John Doe
email = john@example.com

[unicode]
replace = true

Additionally, it can replace (c) with © automatically, if you set the option in the config file.

How To Use It

There is a command line utility that you can use to update the copyright in given files.

Then there is also a Vim plugin that checks your files every time you save a file. That way, the copyright is always up to date.

• Python Package Index page

Installation

Makefile

On Debian based systems, you can just call make install. If you want other options passed to ./setup.py install, then call make with a different setupoptions=… argument, where you can specify all the options that you want to setuptools.

Manual

Go into the python folder and install the Python modules. You can either do it for all users:

python setup.py install

Or just for yourself:

python setup.py install --user

Then copy the contents of the vim folder (that is plugin) into your ~/.vim folder. If you use Pathogen, you should copy the files into ~/.vim/bundle/copyright_updater/plugin/.