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 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.
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.
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
^.
- 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/
AUTHOR¶
Vadim Gelfer <vadim.gelfer@gmail.com>
Mercurial was written by Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>.
SEE ALSO¶
hg(1),
hgrc(5)
COPYING¶
This manual page is copyright 2006 Vadim Gelfer. Mercurial is copyright
2005-2012 Matt 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