The files with copyright headers are not skipped.

[earik87]

Hey all,

I am running the command below.

addlicense -f license.txt .

This should ignore the files which has the header defined in license.txt. However, it adds a new header on top of files where license header exists already.

[tfroseman]

Thank you for raising a bug report. I attempted to reproduce this but could not reproduce the symptoms reported. Would you be able to describe a bit more detail if your example differs from my example below?

In my example I am using addlicense 1.2.0, I have a file named license.txt that contains the following

Copyright 2018 Google LLC

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

And two files main.go and other.go. Each file contains the same overly simple content with the only difference being that main.go contains the license header. Upon running as you have described only one file has the license added.

// Copyright 2018 Google LLC
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
// You may obtain a copy of the License at
//
//     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
//
// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
// distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
// limitations under the License.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

[earik87]

Thanks for the response. Here is my copyright license file content.

© 2013 - 2025, Company Name. All rights reserved

And here is my go file. It keeps adding.

// © 2013 - 2025, Company Name. All rights reserved

// © 2013 - 2025, Company Name. All rights reserved

// © 2013 - 2025, Company Name. All rights reserved

// © 2013 - 2025, Company Name. All rights reserved

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

[tfroseman]

Confirmed your report. Given that the only special bit about your report is the non-ascii © symbol, I would hazard a guess this is breaking something about our detection.

https://github.com/google/addlicense/blob/master/main.go#L428 checks if the first 1000 bytes contain known identifiers rather than matching on explicit content. So it is not your usage of non-ascii symbols, but rather that the your did not include the term copyright. The "simple" patch here is to also look for the © symbol which may preserve existing behavior without attempting to perform an explicit longer match which would break our previous behavior of not changing the copyright text if it already is present. Will need to think about any pitfalls, but the simple case may be the best case.