How to exclude a directory specified with parent dirs?

[kaushalmodi]

Hi,

I believe that the below in ~/.ctags used to work:

--exclude=dir1/dir2/common

But it is not working any more as of the latest build of today (My last ctags build was roughly 3 months back. So unfortunately that will not help in debugging this).

If I change that to

--exclude=common

it works. But the side-effect is that all common/ directories will be excluded, which I don't want.

Example:

I have these directory structures:

dir1/dir2/common
dir1/dir3/common

How can I exclude only dir1/dir2/common?

Thanks.

[masatake]

How about --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/* ?
How did you invoke ctags?
Something like ctags -R dir1 or cd dir1/..; ctags -R . ?

[masatake]

NOTE: isExcludedFile@(ctags/main/options.c)

[masatake]

dir0/dir1/dir2/common and ./dir1/dir2/common cannot be excluded with --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/*
--exclude=*/dir1/dir2/common/* may be needed here.

[kaushalmodi]

How about --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/* ?

That works or doesn't work based on the invocation of ctags. See explanation below.

How did you invoke ctags?

cd /proj/PRJ/somedir/
ctags -Re -f /proj/PRJ/somedir/TAGS /proj/PRJ/somedir/.

---

If I do the above style of ctags invocation, --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/* does not work. But if I invoke using cd /proj/PRJ/somedir/; ctags -Re -f TAGS ., the same exclude statement works as expected.

However, --exclude=*/dir1/dir2/common/* worked whether I did,

cd /proj/PRJ/somedir/
ctags -Re -f /proj/PRJ/somedir/TAGS /proj/PRJ/somedir/.

or

cd /proj/PRJ/somedir/
ctags -Re -f TAGS .

[kaushalmodi]

Also, I did not understand this:

NOTE: isExcludedFile@(ctags/main/options.c)

[masatake]

Why is the exclusion sensitive to whether the TAGS file path is specified relatively or using the absolute path?

I don't understand the situation.
Where is dir1 in /proj/PRJ/somedir ?

[kaushalmodi]

I am doing some more testing .. here is what I got so far:

# --exclude=*/dir1/dir2/common/*
# Good - ctags -Re -f /proj/PRJ/somedir/TAGS /proj/PRJ/somedir/.
# Good - ctags -Re -f TAGS                   /proj/PRJ/somedir/.
# Bad  - ctags -Re -f /proj/PRJ/somedir/TAGS .
# Bad  - ctags -Re -f TAGS .
# Conclusion: When using * in the beginning of an exclusion path, use absolute
#             path for search start path when invoking ctags.

Where is dir1 in /proj/PRJ/somedir ?

Here is the dir1 path: /proj/PRJ/somedir/dir1

Update

And when I do not use * in the beginning of the exclude path, like this: --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/*, the states of the good and bad cases above flip. So in that case, I need to use relative path for search start path to make the exclusions work.

I find this difference between the use of absolute and relative paths very odd.

Update 2

Here's the kicker.. so if I start an exclude path with * but not following with a forward slash, exclusions work whether I use absolute or relative paths for the search start paths.

Example: --exclude=*dir1/dir2/common/*

---

SUMMARY:
Good -> --exclude=*dir1/dir2/common/* - Either absolute or relative search start path will work.
Bad -> --exclude=*/dir1/dir2/common/* - Need to use absolute search start path, relative will not work.
Bad -> --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/* - Need to use relative search start path, absolute will not work.

[masatake]

Oh, I see. Thank you. For the Bad cases --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/* will work.
... How about --exclude=*dir1/dir2/common/* ? This will work well for the both Good and Bad patterns.
Sure, xdir1/dir2/common is also excluded unexpectedly.

[kaushalmodi]

How about --exclude=dir1/dir2/common/ ? This will work well for the both Good and Bad patterns.

Yes, that's the conclusion I came to finally :) Should I close this issue? Or do you think there's a solution that make this more robust whether the user is using absolute or relative paths?

For example, if the user specifies a path starting with /, it should be detected as an absolute path and the exclude pattern should be appended to it directly.

If the user's start path is NOT start with / but is some relative path XYZ, the exclude pattern should be appended to $cwd/XYZ/.