.gitignore not taken into account when the current working directory is a subdirectory

[Flimm]

If I run ag in the directory that contains .gitignore, it reads it and takes it into account. However, if I run ag in a subdirectory of the git working directory, it doesn't take it into account any more.

[emberian]

I'm working on a patch for this

[dahjelle]

Just ran into this…be great to see it included!

[emberian]

One potential problem is that it doesn't stop when it hits a .gitignore, and it will catch every parent .gitignore, which isn't how git behaves.

[Flimm]

Git does read every parent .gitignore until it reaches the directory with .git.

[emberian]

It doesn't read beyond that, though, which is what I was trying to get
across. Current code reads everything up to the root directory.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 7:57 AM, David D Lowe notifications@github.comwrote:

Git does read every parent .gitignore until it reaches the directory with
.git.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/144#issuecomment-14709325
.

[jucor]

Any news on this patch? I just realized that Ag ignore list is not the same as git. It is probably linked to this issue. Does Ag also read the global ignore file from config.excludesfile?

[sandermarechal]

Any news on this issue? I'd love to see it resolved. This issue makes ag hard to work with in large repositories.

[tremby]

I'd recommend just using git grep. You know it'll always respect the .gitignore file properly.

[dbedrenko]

@sandermarechal @tremby Or ack for that matter.

A crappy workaround with ag is to make .agignore a symbolic link to whatever repo you are currently working on (in my case it would be my current project at work).

Can't we just re-use the .gitignore-finding and parsing code from the git source itself? I see so many issues related to .gitignore.

[Flimm]

The thing is, .agignore isn't intrepreted exactly like .gitignore. For example, in .gitignore, if a line starts with a forward slash, it matches patterns directly in the parent directory. .agignore doesn't seem to accept lines that begin with a forward slash.

[tremby]

At the risk of being a broken record, give git grep a go. It's as fast as ag, or seems to be, and will always get your .gitignore right. My only annoyance with it is that in its machine readable output it doesn't give the column number, so it's not quite as useful as ag etc for quickfix lists in vim.

[velrest]

Whats the status of this issue? Is this fixed already or still WIP? This would really help since i end up always searching thru all my build files etc.

[ryanblakeley]

If you're in a pinch, you can use .ignore, from https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/wiki/Advanced-Usage#ignore . IMO not the most elegant solution. I'd prefer to just rely on .gitignore, even if it's in a parent. Is there something that makes it super hard to patch support for .gitignore in parent dirs? If I do ag -Q 'my search' mysubdir to confine my search to a sub-dir I immediately lose the benefit of .gitignore. that's kind of a bummer. edit: I ended up replacing ag with rg. kind of nice bonus not having to add the -Q option for string-literals.

[dosentmatter]

Here's a workaround using a shell bash function. It checks if you are currently in a git repo and if so, gets the .gitignore. If not, it passes an empty string to -p '', which seems to get ignored.

ag() {
  command ag \
    -p "$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree &>/dev/null && echo "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.gitignore")" \
    "$@"
}