Identify Unlinked Files

Allen, I'll throw out one more possibility (and James, I have a question about yours).

First, taking off from Dave's suggestion, note that there are tools (including free ones) which can audit any and all files accessed (by any process or a given process), and that can be logged. You could run such a tool for a day or a week and use its output to help you find what files were never accessed...though again that's only for that timeframe you audit. And of course, the longer you audit the larger the audit log will be. I list some such tools here: https://www.cf411.com/security_file_change_detection (their focus is on files "changed", but some can just watch files "read").

James, back to your first comment, can you clarify what "exception" you're referring to? I'm only now seeing this thread, but neither Allen's or Dave's comments before your refer to any exception. Is it perhaps that they've been edited? Or if not, can you clarify the connection between any exceptions and Allen's original post? I'm not asking to be annoying, but just to connect the dots (and to help future readers).

I see how your subsequent comments instead focus on leveraging the debugging output, to the degree that it tracks each file referenced. That said, it will only track CFM or CFC pages (or any extensions that might be cfincluded), but it's not clear if Allen's folder of files is only CFM files or (as Dave was addressing) perhaps also files uploaded or created by users and perhaps accesses with things like cffile, etc, which the debugging would not track.

Still, you both give him ideas to get started, and perhaps one of mine may help if those somehow don't.

During onRequestEnd, you could capture the exception data, loop over "tagContext" array and log the data as desired:

<cfset oException = createObject("java","java.lang.Exception").init()>
<cfdump var="#oException#">

This approach would assist in identifying line number, type of include (CFInclude, javaproxy, etc), template path and file type.  (This is the opposite of what you requested, but is probably the more pragmatic way of identifying files that aren't used.)

It is possible that some requests may access different internal scripts based on parameters passed and/or user permissions, so you'll want to log the data for an extended period so you can capture a large variation of users and requests.

This is, I think, more difficult than it seems it should be! There are so many ways a file might be referenced as part of your application without even having its name specified. Most of those ways aren't good to use, but they're there and there's nothing you can really do about it. For example, let's say you have a file where the user can provide form input, then you use that input in a less-than-obvious manner to reference a file once the form is submitted.

So, my recommmendation is to do something different. First, add a CFLOG reference to the top of every file that logs the file's use. You can do this in Application.cfm or Application.cfc, I think, or you can explicitly do it within each file. Then, run a test script that performs ABSOLUTELY EVERY TASK within your application. This is good for other things beyond solving this problem, like being able to test every task within your application! Of course, you'll have to write the test script yourself.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC