On Friday, October 24th, 2025 at 1:58 AM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

Jeff King peff@peff.net writes:

quoted

Subject: match_pathname(): give fnmatch one char of prefix context

In match_pathname(), which we use for matching .gitignore and
.gitattribute patterns, we are comparing paths with with fnmatch

"with with" -> "with".

quoted

patterns (actually our extended wildmatch, which will be important).
There's an extra optimization there: we pre-compute the number of
non-wildcard characters at the beginning of the pattern and do an
fspathncmp() on that prefix.

That lets us avoid fnmatch entirely on patterns without wildcards, and
shrinks the amount of work we hand off to fnmatch. For a pattern like
"foo*.txt" and a path "foobar.txt", we'd cut away the matching "foo"
prefix and just pass "*.txt" and "bar.txt" to fnmatch().

But this misses a subtle corner case. In fnmatch(), we'll think
"bar.txt" is the start of the path, but it's not. This doesn't matter
for the pattern above, but consider the wildmatch pattern "foo**/bar"
and the path "foobar". These two should not match, because there is no
file named "bar", and the "" applies only to the containing directory
name. But after removing the "foo" prefix, fnmatch will get "/bar" and
"bar", which it does consider a match, because "**/" can match zero
directories.

Ouch.

quoted

We can solve this by giving fnmatch a bit more context. As long as it
has one byte of the matched prefix, then it will know that "bar" is not
the start of the path. In this example it would get "o**/bar" and
"obar", and realize that they cannot match.

In the case that there are no wildcards at all (i.e., the whole prefix
matches), we'll continue to return without running fnmatch at all. We
just need to account for the extra byte in our adjusted lengths.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King peff@peff.net
---
I wonder how much this prefix-matching buys us in practice. There are
two cases that are helped:

1. When there is no wildcard in the pattern at all, we skip fnmatch
entirely.

2. We do a raw match of the prefix chars, shrinking the size of what
is passed to fnmatch.

My suspicion is that most of the improvement comes from (1), and it
would be very easy to retain that case and get rid of (2). But I haven't
done any measuring.

The above matches my intuition as well.

quoted

diff --git a/dir.c b/dir.c
index 0a67a99cb3..764400d9c5 100644
--- a/dir.c
+++ b/dir.c

@@ -1360,6 +1360,13 @@ int match_pathname(const char *pathname, int pathlen,

if (fspathncmp(pattern, name, prefix))
return 0;
+
+ /*
+ * Retain one character of the prefix to
+ * pass to fnmatch, which lets it distinguish
+ * the start of a directory component correctly.
+ */
+ prefix--;
pattern += prefix;
patternlen -= prefix;
name += prefix;

So, checking pattern "foo/bar" against "foo/bar", we'd use
"oo/bar" to match "oo/bar", which is not necessary but our
conjecture is that feeding shorter fnmatch() is not buying
us much, which justifies this change.

Actually, I too just realized that skipping the matching non-wildcard prefix doesn't provide any optimization (Correct me, if I am wrong). We any need to compare both pattern and path until the end of the prefix be it match_pathname() or fnmatch(). Any idea why this is explicitly done? May be a small demonstration through an example?

If not, we could do a more targetted pessimization, perhaps like
this, ...

/* the non-wildcard prefix does not match? /
if (fspathncmp(pattern, name, prefix))
return 0;

/ the non-wildcard prefix is the whole thing? /
if (namelen == prefix && patternlen == prefix)
return 1;

/ avoid making foo**/bar match foobar */
if (3 <= prefix && memcmp(pattern, "**/", 3)
prefix--;
pattern += prefix;
patternlen -= prefix;
name += prefix;
namelen -= prefix;

... but that is even more specific hack than yours.

Yes. There is no way we are doing this. We are literally bypassing this single scenario in the code which is not a good practice

quoted

@@ -1370,7 +1377,7 @@ int match_pathname(const char *pathname, int pathlen,

* then our prefix match is all we need; we
* do not need to call fnmatch at all.
*/
- if (!patternlen && !namelen)
+ if (patternlen == 1 && namelen == 1)
return 1;
}

In any case, I do prefer doing this "our non-wildcard part matched
the whole thing, so let's return true" before stripping matching
prefix from the pattern and the name (like I showed earlier).

quoted

diff --git a/t/t0008-ignores.sh b/t/t0008-ignores.sh
index 273d71411f..db8bde280e 100755
--- a/t/t0008-ignores.sh
+++ b/t/t0008-ignores.sh

@@ -847,6 +847,17 @@ test_expect_success 'directories and ** matches' '

test_cmp expect actual
'

+test_expect_success '** not confused by matching leading prefix' '
+ cat >.gitignore <<-\EOF &&
+ foo**/bar
+ EOF
+ git check-ignore foobar foo/bar >actual &&
+ cat >expect <<-\EOF &&
+ foo/bar
+ EOF
+ test_cmp expect actual
+'
+
############################################################################
#
# test whitespace handling