The standard GNU etags does not support a recursive walk of directories as done by exuberant ctags -R. If I only have access to the GNU etags, how can I use bash shell magic to get etags to produce a TAGS table for all the C++ files *.cpp and *.h files in the current directory and all directories below the current one recursively to create a TAGS table in the current directory which has the proper path name for emacs to resolve the TAGS table entries.
The Emacs Wiki is often a good source for answers to common problems or best practices. For your specific problem there is a solution for both Windows and Unixen:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RecursiveTags#toc2
Basically you run a command to find all .cpp and all .h files (change file selectors if you use different file endings, such as e.g., .C) and pipe the result into etags. Since Windows does not seem to have xargs, you need a more recent version of etags that can read from stdin (note the dash at the end of the line which symbolizes stdin). Of course, if you use a recent version of etags, you can use the dash parameter instead of xargs there, too.
Windows:
cd c:\source-root
dir /b /s *.cpp *.h *.hpp | etags --your_options -
Unix:
cd /path/to/source-root
find . -name "*.cpp" -print -or -name "*.h" -print | xargs etags --append