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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T22:16:19+00:00

Here’s a problem I’ve had recently that just HAS to be a common pain

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Here’s a problem I’ve had recently that just HAS to be a common pain to others here.

I’m working with someone else’s legacy C code and need to find where a function or macro was defined. The code #includes a bunch of different standard system libraries in addition to those from the specific project.

Is there a tool or technique to quickly find where a specific function, macro, (or other global for that matter) was defined?

I tried: 

grep -R 'function' /usr/lib

and other similar *nix/bash-fu with only limited success and lots of annoying chaff to cull. One of you sage coders out there must have a good solution to this seemingly common scenario.

I was very surprised to not find another question on this particular pain here or in my searches of the interwebs. (I’m sure there will be angry comments if I missed one… ;-))

Thanks in advance for any tips!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use etags/ctags from the exuberant ctags project in conjunction with an editor (emacs, vim) that understands them, or GNU GLOBAL.

    Oh, and if you happen to use automake it generates a target TAGS. So no need for complicated manual calls to {c,e}tags.

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