hgignore(5) - phpMan

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 manually. It is typ-
ically put under version control, so that the settings will propagate to other reposito-
ries 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 ig-
nore files. See the ignore configuration key on the [ui] section of hg help config for de-
tails 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-syn-
tax, you have to use rootglob.

Subdirectories can have their own .hgignore settings by adding subinclude:path/to/sub-
dir/.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/

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 AT gmail.com>

Mercurial was written by Olivia Mackall <olivia AT selenic.com>.