Yes, you can work with Universal Ctags by passing source code via stdin and having it output tags to stdout. This can be useful for integrating into scripts or editor pipelines.

Here’s how you can do it:

cat your_source_code_file | ctags -f - -

Explanation:

• -f -: This tells Universal Ctags to write the tags to stdout.
• -: This tells it to read the source code from stdin.

For example, if you have a file named example.c, you could run:

cat example.c | ctags -f - -

This would output the generated tags to stdout. You can also pipe or redirect the output for further processing.

Alternatively, you can use < to pass the file contents directly:

ctags -f - - < your_source_code_file