How can I ignore everything under a folder in Mercurial

Question

I am looking for an expression for the .hgignore file, to ignore all files beneath a specified folder.

eg: I would like to ignore all files and folders beneath bin

Actually any advice on how the expressions are formed would be great

Melisent

Answer 1

Alternately:

syntax: glob
bin/**

Excellent

this is much easier I think :) – Melisent

PhiLho, I think that would also filter out files named bin – Shigella

This answer, plus this documentation helped me: selenic.com/mercurial/hgignore.5.html – Mofette

bin bin/ bin/* bin/** - All do the same thing with glob i.e. ignore all directories & sub-directories named bin but not any file name bin.txt or bin1 . What's the point of asterix? – Cauda

I like it as clarity, but certainly use 'bin' if you've internalized the glob rules (I'm a re sort of guy) – Excellent

I have had serious problems with ignoring bin, it seams to be special. I can have the correct pattern and it does not work, I then use another pattern (Debug the only subdirectory) and the directory is ignored, then switch back to the correct one and all is ok. I have no idea where this memory is coming from. – Chrysoprase

I think that @buffer is wrong. For experience I have sow that when I use bin/ or bin/* only ignore one level and with bin/** it ignore things in bin and subfolders. But I think this is a bug or wrong interpretation of spec. – Monzon

If you use TortoiseHg, here's a link about ignoring files that may be helpful. tortoisehg.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ignore.html – Bedder

Answer 2

I did some experiments and I found that the regex syntax on Windows applies to the path starting with the current repository, with backslashes transformed to slashes.

So if your repository is in E:\Dev for example, hg status will apply the patterns against foo/bar/file1.c and such. Anchors apply to this path.

So:

• Glob applies to path elements and is rooted to element parts
• foo matches any folder (or file) named foo (not to "foobar" nor "barfoo")
• *foo* matches any folder or file with "foo" in the name
• foo/bar* matches all files in "foo" folder starting with "bar"

• Regex is case sensitive, not anchored
• Of course, backslash regex special characters like . (dot)
• / matches \ path separator on Windows. \ doesn't match this separator...
• foo matches all files and folders with "foo" inside
• foo/ matches only folders ending with "foo"
• /foo/ matches the folder "foo" somewhere in the path
• /foo/bar/ matches the folder "bar" in the folder "foo" somewhere in the path
• ^foo matches file or folder starting by foo at the root of the repository
• foo$ matches file ending with foo

I hope this will help, I found the HGIGNORE(5) page a bit succinct.

Mump

I have the pattern ''[Dd]ebug*/'' in use and the strange Thing is, that it also filters files like ''debug.txt'' – Neelyneeoma

Answer 3

Both of those will also filter out a directory called cabin, which might not be what you want. If you're filtering top-level, you can use:

^/bin/

For bin directories below your root, you can omit the ^. There is no need to specify syntax, regexp is the default.

Monohydric

This won't ignore anything. The caret says only things in the repo root but the leading slash catches only dirs not in the repo root. – Excellent

Answer 4

syntax: glob bin/**

This answer is shown above, however I'd also like to add that * and ** are handled differently. ** is recursive, * is not.

See Hg Patterns

Dermis

Answer 5

Nevermind, I got it

syntax: regexp
bin\\*

expressions follow standard perl regular expression syntax.

Melisent

Indeed, and your expression means "file or folder ending with bin and followed by 0 or more backslashes"... So it works because the backslash is nullified by the *, but it applies anything with "bin" inside. On Windows, hg replaces \ by / before matching. – Mump

Answer 6

to ignore .class files

syntax: regexp
?\.class

Coastland