Unfortunately I'm not even sure how this sort of static analysis is called. It's not really control flow analysis because I'm not looking for function calls and I don't really need data flow analysis because I don't care about the actual values. I just need a tool that lists the locations (file, function) where writing access to a specific variable takes place. I don't even care if that list contained lines that are unreachable. I could imagine that writing a simple parser could suffice for this task but I'm certain that there must be a tool out there that does this simple analysis. As a poor student I would appreciate free or better yet open source tools and if someone could tell me how this type of static analysis is actually called, I would be equally grateful! EDIT: I forgot to mention there's no pointer arithmetic in the code base.