hgignore-58 - syntax for Mercurial ignore files
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.
HGIGNORE(5) Mercurial Manual HGIGNORE(5)
NAME
hgignore - syntax for Mercurial ignore files
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 manu-
ally. 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 pat-
terns 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 fol-
low, 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 pat-
tern, 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 subin-
clude:path/to/subdir/.hgignore to the root .hgignore. See hg help pat-
terns 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/
DEBUGGING
Use the debugignore command to see if and why a file is ignored, or to
see the combined ignore pattern. See hg help debugignore for details.
AUTHOR
Vadim Gelfer <vadim.gelfer@gmail.com>
Mercurial was written by Olivia Mackall <olivia@selenic.com>.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+---------------+----------------------------------+
|ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+---------------+----------------------------------+
|Availability | developer/versioning/mercurial58 |
+---------------+----------------------------------+
|Stability | Committed |
+---------------+----------------------------------+
SEE ALSO
hg(1), hgrc(5)
COPYING
This manual page is copyright 2006 Vadim Gelfer. Mercurial is copy-
right 2005-2021 Olivia Mackall. Free use of this software is granted
under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any
later version.
AUTHOR
Vadim Gelfer <vadim.gelfer@gmail.com>
Organization: Mercurial
NOTES
Source code for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
code-downloads.html.
This software was built from source available at
https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland. The original community
source was downloaded from https://www.mercurial-scm.org/release/mer-
curial-5.8.tar.gz.
Further information about this software can be found on the open source
community website at http://mercurial-scm.org/.
HGIGNORE(5)