Re: Bug Report (Feature request?) etags (GNU Emacs 21.1)

[Richard Stallman]

    if etags finds a #line directive in file X pointing to file Y, and if
    file Y is given on the command line, then ignore file X.

I think that is the right thing for it to do.

    Maybe this would better be handled by not giving file X to etags to
    parse.

Sure, that will work, but it is inconvenient--you can't write *.c, you
have to list all the .c files except one.  It would be much nicer if
you etags could omit that one file for you, so you could use *.c.