cscope is a programming tool which works in console mode, text-based interface, that allows computer programmers or software developers to search source code of the programming language C, with some support for C++ and Java.

Joe Steffen began writing cscope in 1980, as an aid to his programming word on a PDP-11.

[2] The tool became very popular within Bell Labs, as fellow employees requested more features and improvements.

The functions in cscope are available to varying degrees in modern graphical text editors.

The developer can often use find or other Unix tools to get the list of filenames needed to index into a file called cscope.files.