Mercurial accepts several notations for identifying one or more files at a time. By default, Mercurial treats filenames as shell-style extended glob patterns. Alternate pattern notations must be specified explicitly. .. note:: Patterns specified in ``.hgignore`` are not rooted. Please see :hg:`help hgignore` for details. To use a plain path name without any pattern matching, start it with ``path:``. These path names must completely match starting at the current repository root. To use an extended glob, start a name with ``glob:``. Globs are rooted at the current directory; a glob such as ``*.c`` will only match files in the current directory ending with ``.c``. The supported glob syntax extensions are ``**`` to match any string across path separators and ``{a,b}`` to mean "a or b". To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with ``re:``. Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository. To read name patterns from a file, use ``listfile:`` or ``listfile0:``. The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file pattern. To read a set of patterns from a file, use ``include:`` or ``subinclude:``. ``include:`` will use all the patterns from the given file and treat them as if they had been passed in manually. ``subinclude:`` will only apply the patterns against files that are under the subinclude file's directory. See :hg:`help hgignore` for details on the format of these files. All patterns, except for ``glob:`` specified in command line (not for ``-I`` or ``-X`` options), can match also against directories: files under matched directories are treated as matched. Plain examples:: path:foo/bar a name bar in a directory named foo in the root of the repository path:path:name a file or directory named "path:name" Glob examples:: glob:*.c any name ending in ".c" in the current directory *.c any name ending in ".c" in the current directory **.c any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of the current directory including itself. foo/*.c any name ending in ".c" in the directory foo foo/**.c any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of foo including itself. Regexp examples:: re:.*\.c$ any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository File examples:: listfile:list.txt read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters See also :hg:`help filesets`. Include examples:: include:path/to/mypatternfile reads patterns to be applied to all paths subinclude:path/to/subignorefile reads patterns specifically for paths in the subdirectory