That seems unlikely to be the case; the variable being assigned is through a pointer to a struct, which is already being accessed in the context. (Plus, of course, __attribute__((unused)) or similar in a macro would be preferable for silencing warnings) It's pretty likely that, had this occured at the top of a function, and been a direct assignment, the author would not have flagged it (indeed, perhaps PVS-Studio ignores that case; seems easy enough to implement).