The Mercurial system uses a file called .hgignore in the root directory of a repository to control its behavior when it finds files that it is not currently managing.
Mercurial ignores every unmanaged file that matches any pattern in an ignore file. The patterns in an ignore file do not apply to files managed by Mercurial. To control Mercurial\'s handling of files that it manages, see the
An ignore file is a plain text file consisting of a list of patterns, with one pattern per line. Empty lines are skipped. The "#" character is treated as a comment character, and the "\e" character is treated as an escape character.
Neither glob nor regexp patterns are rooted. A glob\-syntax pattern of the form "*.c" will match a file ending in ".c" in any directory, and a regexp pattern of the form "\e.c$" will do the same. To root a regexp pattern, start it with "^".
This manual page is copyright 2006 Vadim Gelfer. Mercurial is copyright 2005\-2007 Matt Mackall. Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).