Prioritation of global anti-ignores (includes) for fd.

[kazie]

What version of fd are you using?

fd 8.1.1

Hello there, I am happy to find that you have the new feature:

Add global fdignore support #575

But I couldn't get it to work, so let me explain my usecase and thought how I could gotten it to work.

Let's imagine I have a personal global file ending that I don't want to be checked into any of my git projects (except when I choose to force it in). Example ending with ~ as emacs backup files or in my personal example below *.bak.

My intention is to enable this file to be found with fd without having to completely ignore all the good ignores. While it still shall be ignored with my global gitingore.

---

Example granted:
I have a folder with two files, one of which is my *.bak file

kazie@r2m-kazie:~/s/test|HEAD⚡> ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 kazie kazie 0 Sep 25 09:25 file
-rw-r--r-- 1 kazie kazie 0 Sep 25 09:25 file.bak

I have it such that it is ignored by my global gitignore file, which I have set myself to ~/.gitignore.

kazie@r2m-kazie:~> git config --global core.excludesfile
~/.gitignore

kazie@r2m-kazie:~/s/test|HEAD⚡> cat ~/.gitignore
# personal tmp files
*.bak

if I check git status it will correctly not find the *.bak file, as intended.

kazie@r2m-kazie:~/s/test|HEAD⚡> git status
On branch master

No commits yet

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
	file

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

I thought "I should add an not-ignore in my global fd-ignore file"
Which I hope I did

kazie@r2m-kazie:~/s/test|HEAD⚡> cat ~/.config/fd/ignore
!*.bak

But still I cannot get fd to find the bak file while to still have git ignoring it.

kazie@r2m-kazie:~/s/test|HEAD⚡> fd .
file

My expection and hope was that fd would not have ignored the *.bak file here.

---

Is this the intended behavior?
Or maybe I have screwed up with my though process?

I read from the issue of #575

From what I can see, priority is fd/ignore < --ignore-files < .gitignore < .ignore < .fdignore
Which would make the global fd/ignore file less prioritized, and I guess that what I actually want is not to ignore things, but to unignore or include.

Maybe the feature is correct and works as intended, and I should request some kind of fd-include file or something that would take on priority?

---

Maybe this whole question is related to #503?

[sharkdp]

Thank you for reporting this

@soedirgo Any chance you could take a look at this?

[soedirgo]

Sorry for the wait!

Which would make the global fd/ignore file less prioritized, and I guess that what I actually want is not to ignore things, but to unignore or include.

You're exactly right, the reason for the global ignore to have lower priority was because I intended it to be like --ignore-file, which was already there. In your case, what you want is fd --no-ignore-vcs ., so .gitignore files don't take priority.

[kazie]

Sorry for my late response.
I do understand that I could use --no-ignore-vcs but that seems like a really bad fix to do something like:

alias fd="fd --no-ignore-vcs"

As that would disable the feature of ignoring things in git files and such in its entirety.

  13   │         --no-ignore-vcs
  14   │             Show search results from files and directories that would otherwise be ignored by '.gitignore' files.

And from this, one of the major features I also like would be forced to be disabled - since I like ignoring files with gitignore - just like I want to setup fd to "ignore a specific ignore" from the file and not all of it. Thus the:

!*.bak

in the

  ~/.config/fd/ignore

file.

---

So I suppose this would be needed to be rewritten to some sort of feature request? Or does my problem, want thing I want to do make any sense? :)

[soedirgo]

Hmm, that makes sense. I think the solution is to use .fdignore, which will get applied in the directory it's in as well as its children. It's not a clean solution either, but it's the only way I can think of to include stuff to override .gitignores.

[jdrouhard]

Commenting on an almost 2-year-old issue (sorry...), but I'm running into the same issue with 8.4.0, and using a .fdignore alone doesn't actually work:

$ cat .gitignore
build/
$ cat .fdignore
!*.cpp
build/
$ mkdir build
$ touch build/hello.cpp
$ fd --no-ignore-vcs .
$ fd .
$

Seems I am unable to ignore ignores entirely and .fdignore by itself doesn't do the trick.

[tmccombs]

One possible solution would be to have a separate config file that has a higher priority than any other ignore files.

[tavianator]

@jdrouhard Did you mean to put !build/ in the .fdignore? That seems to work.

[jdrouhard]

No, I want to ignore everything in build/ except files ending in .cpp (for this example).

What I'm really trying to do is let fd find files that match a certain pattern inside directories that are otherwise excluded. I have a build directory (ignored in .gitignore) with autogenerated source files and would like to be able to list the generated files inside that directory while excluding everything else. I can make the command as complicated as necessary (even recreating a .fdignore that slightly differs from the .gitignore), but it doesn't seem to be possible at all right now :/

[tmccombs]

The way gitignore, and by extension fdignore, works is if a directory is ignored, then that directory isn't traversed at all, so it is impossible to unignore anything inside 5hay directory, unless you also unignore the directory itself.

[tavianator]

@jdrouhard I see. You could do this in .fdignore:

!build/
build/*
!*.cpp