Ctags error "Is a directory"

Question

I was trying to tag a C++ project with ctags with the options as listed in this answer C++ source tagging. I am in a project tree that contains multiple folders and those folders contain source files. I have tried the following to tag the entire source tree

ctags --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q --language-force=C++ -R .
find . -type f \( -iname "*.cpp" -o -iname "*.hpp" \) | xargs ctags --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q --language-force=C++
ctags -R . 
ctags -R *

and all of the above give the same error

ctags: Failure on attempt to read file : Is a directory

How do I go about fixing this?

Lamontlamontagne

Answer 1

Turns out this was a case insensitive filesystem problem. The MacOSX I am on has case insensitive files and as a result a folder named Tags was affecting the ctags program. Removing the Tags folder or causing ctags to output to another file with the -f flag fixed the issue.

Lamontlamontagne

Same goes on CentOS Linux – Menarche

I actually ran into this error when I used the default Ubuntu Linux ctags. Was able to resolve by installing ctags via sudo apt-get install ctags – Paragraphia