It looks like etags puts a comma on the end of the lisp name of an emacs DEFUN. Eg. the foo.c below which is a copy of car-safe from src/data.c, etags foo.c creates a TAGS file with (expanding ^? and ^A for the sake of mail), foo.c,44 DEFUN ("car-safe", Fcar_safe,^?car-safe,^A1,0 and indeed in emacs M-x visit-tags-table Ret M-. Tab offers a sole completion car-safe, where I didn't expect to see a "," on the end. Seems harmless most of the time because you can type car-safe and M-. will jump to a partial match, but it's not intended is it? It looks like whatever char is after Fcar_safe is included in the tag, you can insert a space there in the source and it goes through.