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ctags [-aCdgIRVh] [-BtTuvwx] [-l language]
[-o tagfile] [-r regexp] [--parse-stdin=file]
[--append] [--backward-search] [--cxref] [--defines] [--forward-search] [--globals] [--ignore-indentation]
[--language=language] [--members] [--output=tagfile] [--regex=regexp] [--typedefs]
[--typedefs-and-c++] [--update] [--help] [--version] file ...
Make tags based on regexp matching for the files following this option,
in addition to the tags made with the standard parsing based on language.
May be freely intermixed with filenames and the -R option. The regexps are
cumulative, i.e. each such option will add to the previous ones. The regexps
are of one of the forms:
[{language}]/tagregexp/[nameregexp/]modifiers
@regexfile
where tagregexp is used to match the tag. It should not match useless
characters. If the match is such that more characters than needed are unavoidably
matched by tagregexp, it may be useful to add a nameregexp, to narrow down
the tag scope. ctags ignores regexps without a nameregexp. The syntax of
regexps is the same as in emacs. The following character escape sequences
are supported: \a, \b, \d, \e, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, which respectively stand for
the ASCII characters BEL, BS, DEL, ESC, FF, NL, CR, TAB, VT.
The modifiers are a sequence of 0 or more characters among i, which means
to ignore case when matching; m, which means that the tagregexp will be
matched against the whole file contents at once, rather than line by line,
and the matching sequence can match multiple lines; and s, which implies
m and means that the dot character in tagregexp matches the newline char
as well.
The separator, which is / in the examples, can be any character different
from space, tab, braces and @. If the separator character is needed inside
the regular expression, it must be quoted by preceding it with \.
The optional {language} prefix means that the tag should be created only
for files of language language, and ignored otherwise. This is particularly
useful when storing many predefined regexps in a file.
In its second form, regexfile is the name of a file that contains a number
of arguments to the --regex= option, one per line. Lines beginning with a
space or tab are assumed to be comments, and ignored.
Here are some examples. All the regexps are quoted to protect them from
shell interpretation.
Tag the DEFVAR macros in the emacs source files:
--regex=’/[ \t]*DEFVAR_[A-Z_ \t(]+"\([^"]+\)"/’
Tag VHDL files (this example is a single long line, broken here for formatting
reasons):
--language=none --regex=’/[ \t]*\(ARCHITECTURE\|\ CONFIGURATION\) +[^ ]* +OF/’ --regex=’/[ \t]*\
\(ATTRIBUTE\|ENTITY\|FUNCTION\|PACKAGE\( BODY\)?\ \|PROCEDURE\|PROCESS\|TYPE\)[ \t]+\([^ \t(]+\)/\3/’
Tag TCL files (this last example shows the usage of a tagregexp):
--lang=none --regex=’/proc[ \t]+\([^ \t]+\)/\1/’
A regexp can be preceded by {lang}, thus restricting it to match lines
of files of the specified language. Use etags --help to obtain a list of
the recognised languages. This feature is particularly useful inside regex
files. A regex file contains one regex per line. Empty lines, and those
lines beginning with space or tab are ignored. Lines beginning with @ are
references to regex files whose name follows the @ sign. Other lines are
considered regular expressions like those following --regex.
For example, the command
etags --regex=@regex.file *.c
reads the regexes contained in the file regex.file.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this document under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this document into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.