Re: [PATCH] Support \ in non-wildcard .gitignore entries

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 01:56:36PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi,

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Finn Arne Gangstad wrote:

quoted

If you had an exclude-pattern with a backslash in it, e.g. "\#foo",
this would not work, since git would do a strcmp of the exclude pattern
and the filename. Only wildcard patterns were matched with fnmatch,
which does the right thing with backslashes. We now also treat all patterns
containing backslashes as wildcards.

De-escaping the pattern while reading the .gitignore file is error prone,
since that would break patterns with both backslashes and wildcards.
E.g. "\\*.c" would be translated to "\*.c" before fnmatch got it,
and would change the meaning of the rule dramatically.

I am not sure I understand (maybe a test case would help, but that test 
case would have to be disabled on Windows, I guess):

You mean that '\#abc' would match '\#abc', but '\#abc*' would not?

Currently, \#abc does not match a file named #abc, but \#abc* does.
With the patch, both will match.

- Finn Arne