Copyright

Add a copyright to your source files

Motivation

When source code files are prepared for distribution it is common for comments to be stripped and text to be minified. As a result, any legal notices regarding ownership and licensing is removed. This tool can be used to add that information back into the distributable file.

Prerequisites and installation

The Copyright utility uses Node.js. Package installation is done via NPM. These are the only two prerequisites.

To install the utility and make it available to your Bash shell, use this command.

[user@host]# npm install -g copyright-notice

Usage

The software is invoked from the command line with:

[user@host]# copyright [copyright file] [destination file] 

The destination file is prepended with the contents of the copyright file. The contents should be in comment form, using whatever syntax is appropriate to the source code language of the destination. So /* ... */ for CSS, or // ... for JavaScript, or <!-- ... --> for HTML, etc. Linefeeds in the copyright file are retained as is.

For the most efficient use of resources, this utility should be invoked by a build tool that is sensitive to file modification timestamps, so that it is triggered for each file in a nested hierarchy only when a source file is changed. (The Read Write Tools prorenata builder has this capability.)

License

The copyright command line utility is licensed under the MIT License.

Availability