mercurial/helptext/patterns.txt

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