It's rather unnecessary for files to contain their path/filename in source code comments. Here's a trivial little script that can remove embedded filenames in c90 style comments from files. This requires git. It does the following types of removals: remove individual lines like /* filename */ completely remove filename from /* filename -- comment */, leave /* comment */ remove filename and any trailing ' *\n' from /* filename, leave /* remove filename from /* filename, leave /* remove filename from continuation ' * filename -- comment' leave ' * comment' remove filename and any trailing ' *\n' from continuation ' * filename\n *\n' It seems to work well enough. It does not handle c99 comments. No // filename variants are removed. Running it on today's -next gives: $ perl remove_embedded_filenames.pl $ git diff --shortstat 2310 files changed, 354 insertions(+), 4239 deletions(-) It's also possible to give any filename or path as an argument to the script For instance: $ perl remove_embedded_filenames.pl drivers/net