#315 ctags cannot recognize tags files made by ctags

[Jeff May]

The problem is pretty simple so I'll just use terminal output.

$ ctags --version
Exuberant Ctags 5.9~svn20110310, Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Darren Hiebert
Compiled: Mar 18 2011, 10:34:00
...
$ ctags -R Work/*
$ ctags -R Work/*
ctags: "Work/tags" doesn't look like a tag file; I refuse to overwrite it.

I'm on Kubuntu 11.10

[Jeff May]

I think this is caused because the tags file starts with:

"

directory verb docsrc ).
optional free download on OS X)
"

I don't know why that spam is there, but it is pissing off the tags validator..

[Jeff May]

I just found out a couple things:

1) The problem is what I mentioned before. When I remove those three lines at the top, everything works.

2) The problem is worse than I thought. It doesn't just apply to child directories:

$ ctags -R *
$ ctags -R *
ctags: "tags" doesn't look like a tag file; I refuse to overwrite it.

[Jeff May]

I just found out a couple things:

1) The problem is what I mentioned before. When I remove those three lines at the top, everything works.

2) The problem is worse than I thought. It doesn't just apply to child directories:

$ ctags -R *
$ ctags -R *
ctags: "tags" doesn't look like a tag file; I refuse to overwrite it.

[lavrin]

I confirm.

It seems that some part of content scanned for tags gets inserted at the top of the tags file when overwriting it. In my case that inserted part is different than in jnmay87's and it certainly comes from the files I want to generate tags for.

My env:
$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS"

$ ctags --version
Exuberant Ctags 5.9~svn20110310, Copyright (C) 1996-2009 Darren Hiebert
Compiled: Nov 9 2011, 17:42:21
Addresses: <dhiebert@users.sourceforge.net>, http://ctags.sourceforge.net
Optional compiled features: +wildcards, +regex