CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexgitgitignoremetacharacters
Jacob Krieg
Jacob Krieg

Reputation: 3174

Extended regular expressions (ERE) for .gitignore

Is there a way to use extended regular expressions(ERE) in a .gitignore file? For example I want to use the + repetition character in a .gitignore file. Is there a way to do that?

Upvotes: 35

Views: 23679

Answers (2)

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1326932

As illustrated here and detailed in "this question", the function fnmatch() is involved to interpret glob patterns, which means regular expressions are not supported.

This is what gitignore man page mentions:

Otherwise, git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag: wildcards in the pattern will not match a / in the pathname.
For example, "Documentation/*.html" matches "Documentation/git.html" but not "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html" or "tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html".

You can see some correspondence between glob patterns and regular expressions in those questions.

Upvotes: 34

vonbrand
vonbrand

Reputation: 11831

The .gitignore (and other) files use filename globs, not regular expressions.

I very much doubt you can convince the git hackers to change that: Just too ingrained by now, and globs are much more familiar as filename matchers.

Upvotes: 13

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