.hgignore syntax for ignoring only files, not directories?

Question

I have a problem which I can\'t seem to understand. I\'m using TortoiseHg (version 0.7.5) on Windows but on Linux I have the same problem. Here it is:

My .hgignore

Answer 1

I relayed this question in #mercurial on irc.freenode.net and the response was that you cannot distinguish between files and directories — the directory is matched without the slash that you're searching for in your regexp.

However, if you can assume that your directories will never contain a full-stop ., but your files will, then something like this seems to work:

^[^/]*\..*$

I tested it in a repository like this:

% hg status -ui
? a.txt
? bbb
? foo/x.txt
? foo/yyy

Adding the .hgignore file gives:

% hg status -ui
? bbb
? foo/x.txt
? foo/yyy
I .hgignore
I a.txt

which indicates that the a.txt file is correctly ignored in your root directory, but x.txt in the foo subdirectory is not. You can also see that a file named just bbb in the root directory is not ignored. But maybe you can add such files yourself to the .hgignore file.

If you happen to have a directory like bar.baz in your root directory, then this directory and all files within will be ignored. I hope this helps a bit.

Answer 2

Here is a dirty trick:

Create an empty file ".hidden" in your directory, than add to .hgignore:

^mydir/(?!\.hidden).+$

This will ignore all files in the directory except ".hidden".