File Name Patterns

Mercurial accepts several notations for identifying one or more files at a time.

By default, Mercurial treats filenames verbatim without pattern matching, relative to the current working directory. Note that your system shell might perform pattern matching of its own before passing filenames into Mercurial.

Alternate pattern notations must be specified explicitly.

Note:

Patterns specified in ".hgignore" are not rooted. Please see 'hg help hgignore' for details.

To use a plain path name without any pattern matching, start it with "path:". These path names must completely match starting at the current repository root, and when the path points to a directory, it is matched recursively. To match all files in a directory non-recursively (not including any files in subdirectories), "rootfilesin:" can be used, specifying an absolute path (relative to the repository root).

To use an extended glob, start a name with "glob:". Globs are rooted at the current directory; a glob such as "*.c" will only match files in the current directory ending with ".c". "rootglob:" can be used instead of "glob:" for a glob that is rooted at the root of the repository.

The supported glob syntax extensions are "**" to match any string across path separators and "{a,b}" to mean "a or b".

To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with "re:". Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository.

To read name patterns from a file, use "listfile:" or "listfile0:". The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file pattern.

To read a set of patterns from a file, use "include:" or "subinclude:". "include:" will use all the patterns from the given file and treat them as if they had been passed in manually. "subinclude:" will only apply the patterns against files that are under the subinclude file's directory. See 'hg help hgignore' for details on the format of these files.

All patterns, except for "glob:" specified in command line (not for "-I" or "-X" options), can match also against directories: files under matched directories are treated as matched. For "-I" and "-X" options, "glob:" will match directories recursively.

Plain examples:

path:foo/bar        a name bar in a directory named foo in the root
                    of the repository
path:path:name      a file or directory named "path:name"
rootfilesin:foo/bar the files in a directory called foo/bar, but not any files
                    in its subdirectories and not a file bar in directory foo

Glob examples:

glob:*.c       any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
*.c            any name ending in ".c" in the current directory
**.c           any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of the
               current directory including itself.
foo/*          any file in directory foo
foo/**         any file in directory foo plus all its subdirectories,
               recursively
foo/*.c        any name ending in ".c" in the directory foo
foo/**.c       any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of foo
               including itself.
rootglob:*.c   any name ending in ".c" in the root of the repository

Regexp examples:

re:.*\.c$      any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository

File examples:

listfile:list.txt  read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line
listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters

See also 'hg help filesets'.

Include examples:

include:path/to/mypatternfile    reads patterns to be applied to all paths
subinclude:path/to/subignorefile reads patterns specifically for paths in the
                                 subdirectory