C:\tmp\pmd-3.9\pmd\bin>pmd c:\data\pmd\pmd\test-data\Unused1.java xml rulesets/unusedcode.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?><pmd>
<file name="c:\data\pmd\pmd\test-data\Unused1.java">
<violation line="5" rule="UnusedLocalVariable">
Avoid unused local variables such as 'fr'
</violation>
</file></pmd>
C:\tmp\pmd-3.9\pmd\bin>
You can pass a file name, a directory name, or a jar or zip file name containing Java source code to PMD.
Also, the PMD binary distribution includes the ruleset files inside the jar file - even though the "rulesets/unusedcode.xml" parameter above looks like a filesystem reference, it's really being used by a getResourceAsStream() call to load it out of the PMD jar file. And the same applies to the example below.
C:\data\pmd\pmd>java -cp lib\pmd-3.9.jar;lib\jaxen-1.1-beta-10.jar;lib\asm-3.0.jar;lib\backport-util-concurrent.jar
net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD
c:\j2sdk1.4.1_01\src\java\lang xml
rulesets/imports.xml
java net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD /path/to/source text basic,imports,unusedcode
-debug - prints a stacktrace if an error is encountered-shortnames - puts shortened names in the report. This only works if the filename argument is a single directory-targetjdk [1.3|1.4|1.5|1.6] - selects either JDK 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 or 1.6 language compatibility; default is 1.4-encoding Cp1252 - uses the specified encoding for reading the source code files-excludemarker NOPMDFORME - uses the specified string of characters as the marker for PMD to ignore. The default string is "NOPMD".-linkprefix - path to HTML source, for summary html renderer only.-lineprefix - custom anchor to affected line in the source file, for summary html renderer only.-minimumpriority - The rule priority threshold; rules with lower priority than they will not be used.