Excluding directories in Exuberant CTags

Question

I\'m working with a very large code base and I find it useful to be selective about which directories are included for use with Exuberant Ctags.

The --exclude<

Answer 1

ack -f | ctags -L -

ack will list the source files in a given dir. You can limit the scope to a specific language with ack -f --ruby or ack -f --type=ruby. You can exclude dirs as well with --ignore-dir.

Use ack --dump to see the built-in file types for ack.

Answer 2

At some point it might be easier to define the list of files you do want indexed; save that list to a file, and use ctags -L <filename> to index just the chosen few.

This lets you use find(1) to prune the directories you don't want to index, e.g.:

find . -path ./Documentation -prune -o -print > indexme

would skip all the files in all subdirectories of ./Documentation.