Creating ctag DB gives “permission denied” error on git-bash (MS Windows)

Question

I am a Linux user (world was pretty neat; less to no headache)-- I've been using vim with cscope to wade through huge code-base....... And for some reason, now I have to use windows machine, here are the things I do have on my PC

git-bash; downloaded Emacs (I start to love it); and within the Emacs package has ctags.exe.

So, I am trying to create the tag file from git-bash

~/Downloads/emacs-26.3-x86_64/bin/ctags.exe -R *

The tag file gets created, but it skips the source code present in the directories, after running the above command I get

bin: Permission denied
contrib: Permission denied
crypto: Permission denied
doc: Permission denied
etc: Permission denied
games: Permission denied
gnu: Permission denied
include: Permission denied
initrd: Permission denied
lib: Permission denied
libexec: Permission denied
nrelease: Permission denied
sbin: Permission denied

Really not sure what I am doing wrong here-- even ran git-bash as an administrator, tried creating tag file from cmd by running it as an admin, yet no luck-- same issue.

What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

I got the answer. Thanks to Eli Zaretskii<eliz@gnu.org>, Gist: ctags on windows won't work on directories.

You are invoking 'ctags' incorrectly: it needs a list of file names to open and scan. You used the wildcard "*" which matches all the files, including the directories, and 'ctags' on Windows cannot open and scan directories, only files.

What you probably want is this instead:

$ find . -name '.[chm]' -o -name '.el' | ~/Downloads/emacs-26.3-x86_64/bin/ctags -

(This assumes you have a GNU 'find' command reachable from the git-bash where you run this.)

Also found this https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BuildTags manual, which I ignored initially, because I though when used the switch -R * ctags can recur on directories and build DB out of files, but it wasn't the case and the error it reported Permission denied also added more confusions to the puzzle.