How to exclude absolute paths?

[rieje]

How to exclude absolute paths with ripgrep? --glob and --ignore-file is based on gitignore file which works on relative paths only. So is fd's --ignore-file, yet absolute paths in ignore files used by fd appears to work (was suggested as a workaround to fd's --exclude which doesn't work with absolute paths).

[BurntSushi]

Please make your question concrete by providing specific examples that others can reproduce. Does something not work? What did you try? What is actual output and what is expected output?

[rieje]

Want to exclude /home/rieje/repo from results.

Both attempts show results of files from that directory:

rg --no-config --glob '!/home/rieje/repo' mystring
# where ~/.config/rg/general.rgignore contains /home/rieje/repo 
rg --no-config -ignore-file ~/.config/rg/general.rgignore mystring

Expected result: files from /home/rieje/repo are excluded from results. Also tried with ** appended to glob pattern.

[BurntSushi]

Yeah that isn't going to work because globs match file paths. You're searching the current working directory, so paths look like ./repo/foo/bar. Therefore, /home/reije/repo doesn't match that. You probably want to do echo repo > /home/rieje/.ignore.

[tmccombs]

This is something that has come up several times with fd as well, for example sharkdp/fd#1337 .

One issue with following the pattern of gitignore, is that with git, it makes since for "absolute" patterns in the ignore rules to be relative to the git repo, because the repo that is the universe of git commands. But for fd and ripgrep there isn't really an equivalent. The ignore crate treats patterns that start with / as relative to the working directory, but I think that is pretty surprising behavior to most users. If I were to design it today, I would have made patterns that start with / match against the absolute path, and maybe have special support for ./ to match relative to the current working directory.

Unfortunately, changing that now would be backwards incompatible, but maybe when the ignore rewrite finally happens, such a breaking change would be acceptable? Or maybe there could be some other way to indicate a pattern is absolute? Perhaps if it starts with ":" or "@"?

Edit:

I'd also like to point out that if you are in a git repo that has a folder "a", and you run git ls-files -o --exclude /foo from the "a" directory, it won't exclude /foo, you instead need to run git ls-files -o --exclude /a/foo. So treating / as relative to the current directory doesn't even match the behavior of git.

[tmccombs]

Oh, and to be clear, I think it makes since for patterns starting with "/" to be relative to the directory of the file for .ignore or .rgignore files. I think matching absolute paths only makes since for patterns in an --ignore-file file or passed in with the --glob option.

[BurntSushi]

Yeah I agree there is something to figure out here. I basically think that ignore filtering needs to be re-thought from first principles while considering the outstanding bugs around this sort of thing. It's on my list of things to do, but it's not a high priority for me unfortunately.