CTAGS

Ctags generates indices of symbol definitions in source files. It started its life as part of the BSD Unix, but there are several more modern flavors. Zoekt supports both exuberant ctags and universal-ctags.

It is strongly recommended to use Universal Ctags, version db3d9a6 or newer, running on the Linux platform.

From this version on, universal ctags will be called using seccomp, which guarantees that security problems in ctags cannot escalate to access to the indexing machine.

Ubuntu, Debian and Arch provide universal ctags with seccomp support compiled in. Zoekt expects the universal-ctags binary to be on $PATH. Note: only Ubuntu names the binary universal-ctags, while most distributions name it ctags.

Use the following invocation to compile and install universal-ctags:

sudo apt-get install
  pkg-config autoconf \
  libseccomp-dev libseccomp \
  libjansson-dev libjansson 

./autogen.sh
LDFLAGS=-static ./configure --enable-json --enable-seccomp
make -j4

# create tarball
NAME=ctags-$(date --iso-8601=minutes | tr -d ':' | sed 's|\+.*$||')-$(git show --pretty=format:%h -q)
mkdir ${NAME}
cp ctags ${NAME}/universal-ctags
tar zcf ${NAME}.tar.gz ${NAME}/