Dear Coccinelle Team,

My name is Edgar Khachatryan, and I am a student currently working on a
project that involves static analysis of C programs. I am particularly
interested in using Coccinelle to detect use-after-free bugs.

I have found and tried to use the kfree.cocci semantic patch provided for
the Linux kernel. However, when I run the command:
spatch --sp-file kfree.cocci file.c

Although I am certain that file.c contains a very simple use-after-free
example, Coccinelle reports the following message:
No rules apply. Perhaps your semantic patch doesn't contain any +/-/* code,
or you have a failed dependency. If the problem is not clear, try
--debug-parse-cocci or check whether any virtual rules (e.g., report)
should be defined.

I also tried running it with --debug-parse-cocci, but I am still unsure how
to proceed. Could you please advise me on how to properly apply Coccinelle
to detect use-after-free issues in simple test files? Am I missing specific
steps or dependencies when using kernel semantic patches on general C code?

Additionally, I would like to know if there are any recommended ways to run
Coccinelle on CMake-based projects. Is there an established method to
integrate Coccinelle with CMake builds, or any workarounds you would
suggest for analyzing such projects?

I would greatly appreciate any guidance, documentation, or best practices
you can share on these topics. Thank you very much for your time and
assistance!

Best regards,
Edgar Khachatryan,
Russian-Armenian University