How to execute findbugs programmatically with selected rules and classes?

Question

I have a very large code base. I would like to execute findbugs programmatically on selected class files with just a selected set of rules at a time so that the analysis can finish in a few seconds. Documentation for includes/excludes say that only matching patterns will be reported, but does not clarify whether all the rules will be processed or only the selected ones.
Would like to know where I can start?

Answer 1

If you are using ant and findbugs anttask, to run a selected set of bug-detectors, use the "visitors" parameter/attribute.

More details here: http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/manual/anttask.html

To run on selected classes only, I just jar-ed the selected classes in a separate jar and pointed the ant task to it via the "class" sub-tag.