Re: something like git-check-ignore but considering only patterns?

From: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 29, 2021, 23:15 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPp-BEQdpO5=j_f2MjgZjhudNZgKhDgV31M_Cy6Agx_U=KweQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAC4O8c-2sxHyAjtd4jZQcjzX4d9+19AUx-h13nttjwP=pd1Ukw@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 12:54 PM Britton Kerin <britton.kerin@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> I'd like to query if a file e.g. symLinkToDir/foo.o would be ignored
> if it were in a real dir instead (don't ask) but in a general way and
> hopefully without parsing and matching all the .gitignore entries
> myself.  Is it possible?

How would that even work?  If there is just one gitignore pattern and it was:

    build/*

And you tried to ask (making up a new `--patterns` flag):

    git check-ignore --patterns '*/foo.o'

What should the command return? True? False? It kinda depends on what that '*' actually is. If it's "build" then it's ignored. If it's not, then for this example it wouldn't be ignored. So the best answer we would be able to give is "maybe", which isn't particularly useful. Also, typical cases will be much more complex than that. So we can only answer whether specific paths are ignored, not whether various globs would be.