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Using ignore patterns
Why should I ignore files?
Ignore patterns are used to ignore certain directory entries, where
versioning makes no sense to the user. If you're versioning the
complete installation of a machine, you wouldn't care to store the
contents of /proc (see man 5 proc), or possibly because of security
reasons you don't want /etc/shadow , /etc/sshd/ssh_host_*key , and/or
other password-containing files.
Ignore patterns allow you to define which directory entries (files,
subdirectories, devices, symlinks etc.) should be taken respectively
ignored.
There are some kinds of ignore patterns; they are listed below.
Shell-like patterns
These must start with ./, just like a base-directory-relative path. ? ,
* as well as character classes [a-z] have their usual meaning, and **
is a wildcard for directory levels.
You can use a backslash \ outside of character classes to match usually
special characters literally, eg. \* within a pattern will match a
literal asterisk character within a file or directory name. Within
character classes all characters except ] are treated literally. If a
literal ] should be included in a character class, it can be placed as
the first character or also be escaped using a backslash.
Example for / as the base-directory
./[oa]pt
./sys
./proc/*
./home/**~
This would ignore files and directories called apt or opt in the root
directory (and files below, in the case of a directory), the directory
/sys and everything below, the contents of /proc (but take the
directory itself, so that upon restore it gets created as a
mountpoint), and all entries matching *~ in and below /home .
Note:
The patterns are anchored at the beginning and the end. So a
pattern ./sys will match only a file or directory named sys. If
you want to exclude a directories' files, but not the directory
itself, use something like ./dir/* or ./dir/**
Absolute shell patterns
There's another way to specify shell patterns - using absolute paths.
The syntax is similar to normal shell patterns; but instead of the ./
prefix the full path, starting with /, is used.
/etc/**.dpkg-old
/etc/**.dpkg-bak
/**.bak
/**~
The advantage of using full paths is that a later dump and load in
another working copy (eg. when moving from versioning /etc to /) does
simply work; the patterns don't have to be modified.
Internally this simply tries to remove the working copy base directory
at the start of the patterns; then they are processed as usually.
If a pattern does not match the wc base, and neither has the
wild-wildcard prefix /**, a warning is issued; this can be handled as
usual.
PCRE-patterns
PCRE stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions; you can read about
them with man pcre (if the manpages are installed), and/or perldoc
perlre (if perldoc is installed)
These patterns have the form PCRE:{pattern} (with PCRE in uppercase, to
distinguish from modifiers).
An example:
PCRE:./home/.*~
This one achieves exactly the same as ./home/**~ .
Another example:
PCRE:./home/[a-s]
This would match /home/anthony , /home/guest , /home/somebody and so
on, but would not match /home/theodore .
Note that the pathnames start with ./ , just like above, and that the
patterns are anchored at the beginning. To additionally anchor at the
end you could use a $ at the end.
Ignoring all files on a device
Another form to discern what is needed and what not is possible with
DEVICE:[<|<=|>|>=]major[:minor].
This takes advantage of the major and minor numbers of inodes (see man
1 stat and man 2 stat).
The rule is as follows:
* Directories have their parent matched against the given string
* All other entries have their own device matched.
This is because the mount-point (ie. the directory, where the other
filesystem gets attached) should be versioned (as it's needed after
restore), but all entries (and all binding mounts) should not.
The possible options <= or >= define a less-or-equal-than respective
bigger-or-equal-than relationship, to ignore a set of device classes.
Examples:
tDEVICE:3
./*
This patterns would define that all filesystems on IDE-devices (with
major number 3) are taken , and all other files are ignored.
DEVICE:0
This would ignore all filesystems with major number 0 - in linux these
are the virtual filesystems ( proc , sysfs , devpts , etc.; see
/proc/filesystems , the lines with nodev ).
Mind NFS and smb-mounts, check if you're using md , lvm and/or
device-mapper !
Note: The values are parsed with strtoul() , so you can use decimal,
hexadecimal (with 0x prepended) and octal (with 0 prepended) notation.
Ignoring a single file, by inode
At last, another form to ignore entries is to specify them via the
device their on and their inode:
INODE:major:minor:inode
This can be used if a file can be hardlinked to many places, but only
one copy should be stored. Then one path can be marked as to take , and
other instances are ignored.
Note:
That's probably a bad example. There should be a better
mechanism for handling hardlinks, but that needs some help from
subversion.
Modifiers
All of these patterns can have one or more of these modifiers *before*
them; not all combinations make sense.
Modifier Meaning
i Ignore case for matching
t A negative ignore pattern, ie. a take pattern.
t./proc/stat
./proc/
Such declaration would store only /proc/stat , and nothing else of
/proc .
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