mercurial/help/hgignore.txt
author Pulkit Goyal <7895pulkit@gmail.com>
Wed, 22 May 2019 02:59:48 +0530
changeset 42432 c767e655ffda
parent 41282 4fab8a7d2d72
permissions -rw-r--r--
narrow: use narrow_widen wireproto command to widen in case of ellipses Few releases ago, we introduce narrow_widen wireproto command to be used to widen narrow repositories. Before this patch, that was used in non-ellipses cases only. In ellipses cases, we still do exchange.pull() which can pull more data than required. After this patch, the client will first check whether server supports doing ellipses widening using wireproto command or not by checking server's wireproto capability. If the server is upto date and support latest ellipses capability, we call the wireproto command. Otherwise we fallback to exchange.pull() like before. The compat code make sure that things works even if one of the client or server is old. The initial version of this patch does not had this compat code. It's added to help Google release things smoothly internally. I plan to drop the compat code before the upcoming major release. Due to change to wireproto command, the code looks a bit dirty, next patches will clean that up. Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D6436

Synopsis
========

The Mercurial system uses a file called ``.hgignore`` in the root
directory of a repository to control its behavior when it searches
for files that it is not currently tracking.

Description
===========

The working directory of a Mercurial repository will often contain
files that should not be tracked by Mercurial. These include backup
files created by editors and build products created by compilers.
These files can be ignored by listing them in a ``.hgignore`` file in
the root of the working directory. The ``.hgignore`` file must be
created manually. It is typically put under version control, so that
the settings will propagate to other repositories with push and pull.

An untracked file is ignored if its path relative to the repository
root directory, or any prefix path of that path, is matched against
any pattern in ``.hgignore``.

For example, say we have an untracked file, ``file.c``, at
``a/b/file.c`` inside our repository. Mercurial will ignore ``file.c``
if any pattern in ``.hgignore`` matches ``a/b/file.c``, ``a/b`` or ``a``.

In addition, a Mercurial configuration file can reference a set of
per-user or global ignore files. See the ``ignore`` configuration
key on the ``[ui]`` section of :hg:`help config` for details of how to
configure these files.

To control Mercurial's handling of files that it manages, many
commands support the ``-I`` and ``-X`` options; see
:hg:`help <command>` and :hg:`help patterns` for details.

Files that are already tracked are not affected by .hgignore, even
if they appear in .hgignore. An untracked file X can be explicitly
added with :hg:`add X`, even if X would be excluded by a pattern
in .hgignore.

Syntax
======

An ignore file is a plain text file consisting of a list of patterns,
with one pattern per line. Empty lines are skipped. The ``#``
character is treated as a comment character, and the ``\`` character
is treated as an escape character.

Mercurial supports several pattern syntaxes. The default syntax used
is Python/Perl-style regular expressions.

To change the syntax used, use a line of the following form::

  syntax: NAME

where ``NAME`` is one of the following:

``regexp``
  Regular expression, Python/Perl syntax.
``glob``
  Shell-style glob.
``rootglob``
  A variant of ``glob`` that is rooted (see below).

The chosen syntax stays in effect when parsing all patterns that
follow, until another syntax is selected.

Neither ``glob`` nor regexp patterns are rooted. A glob-syntax
pattern of the form ``*.c`` will match a file ending in ``.c`` in any
directory, and a regexp pattern of the form ``\.c$`` will do the
same. To root a regexp pattern, start it with ``^``. To get the same
effect with glob-syntax, you have to use ``rootglob``.

Subdirectories can have their own .hgignore settings by adding
``subinclude:path/to/subdir/.hgignore`` to the root ``.hgignore``. See
:hg:`help patterns` for details on ``subinclude:`` and ``include:``.

.. note::

  Patterns specified in other than ``.hgignore`` are always rooted.
  Please see :hg:`help patterns` for details.

Example
=======

Here is an example ignore file. ::

  # use glob syntax.
  syntax: glob

  *.elc
  *.pyc
  *~

  # switch to regexp syntax.
  syntax: regexp
  ^\.pc/