Find unused classes in a Java Eclipse project

java eclipse refactoring
jjujuma picture jjujuma · Mar 20, 2009 · Viewed 46.6k times · Source

I have a large Eclipse project in which there exist several classes which, although they ceased to be used anywhere, were never marked @Deprecated.

How can I easily find all of these?

Answer

VonC picture VonC · Mar 20, 2009

I also like to use UCDetector:

screenshot

UCDetector (Unecessary Code Detector) is a Open Source eclipse PlugIn Tool to find unecessary (dead) public java code. It also tries to make code final, protected or private.

Bonus: it can also find cyclic dependencies between classes

(also a number of other tools -- including Findbugs -- knows how do do that too)

Caveat: Cid mentions in the comments:

UCDetector shall not work if there are interface implementations which will be known only at runtime.
It incorrectly marks the implementation classes as unused.

Update 2017: static code analysis has evolved quite a bit in 8 years.
Using SonarLint for Eclipse, you can use the the latest SonarJava 4.6 plugin to analyze your code.
It will find dead code.

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