NAME

       git-check-ignore - Debug gitignore / exclude files

SYNOPSIS

       git check-ignore [options] pathname...
       git check-ignore [options] --stdin

DESCRIPTION

       For each pathname given via the command-line or from a file via --stdin, check whether the file is
       excluded by .gitignore (or other input files to the exclude mechanism) and output the path if it is
       excluded.

       By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not subject to exclude rules; but see
       ‘--no-index’.

OPTIONS

       -q, --quiet
           Don’t output anything, just set exit status. This is only valid with a single pathname.

       -v, --verbose
           Also output details about the matching pattern (if any) for each given pathname. For precedence rules
           within and between exclude sources, see gitignore(5).

       --stdin
           Read pathnames from the standard input, one per line, instead of from the command-line.

       -z
           The output format is modified to be machine-parseable (see below). If --stdin is also given, input
           paths are separated with a NUL character instead of a linefeed character.

       -n, --non-matching
           Show given paths which don’t match any pattern. This only makes sense when --verbose is enabled,
           otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish between paths which match a pattern and those which
           don’t.

       --no-index
           Don’t look in the index when undertaking the checks. This can be used to debug why a path became
           tracked by e.g.  git add .  and was not ignored by the rules as expected by the user or when
           developing patterns including negation to match a path previously added with git add -f.

OUTPUT

       By default, any of the given pathnames which match an ignore pattern will be output, one per line. If no
       pattern matches a given path, nothing will be output for that path; this means that path will not be
       ignored.

       If --verbose is specified, the output is a series of lines of the form:

       <source> <COLON> <linenum> <COLON> <pattern> <HT> <pathname>

       <pathname> is the path of a file being queried, <pattern> is the matching pattern, <source> is the
       pattern’s source file, and <linenum> is the line number of the pattern within that source. If the pattern
       contained a ! prefix or / suffix, it will be preserved in the output. <source> will be an absolute path
       when referring to the file configured by core.excludesFile, or relative to the repository root when
       referring to .git/info/exclude or a per-directory exclude file.

       If -z is specified, the pathnames in the output are delimited by the null character; if --verbose is also
       specified then null characters are also used instead of colons and hard tabs:

       <source> <NULL> <linenum> <NULL> <pattern> <NULL> <pathname> <NULL>

       If -n or --non-matching are specified, non-matching pathnames will also be output, in which case all
       fields in each output record except for <pathname> will be empty. This can be useful when running
       non-interactively, so that files can be incrementally streamed to STDIN of a long-running check-ignore
       process, and for each of these files, STDOUT will indicate whether that file matched a pattern or not.
       (Without this option, it would be impossible to tell whether the absence of output for a given file meant
       that it didn’t match any pattern, or that the output hadn’t been generated yet.)

       Buffering happens as documented under the GIT_FLUSH option in git(1). The caller is responsible for
       avoiding deadlocks caused by overfilling an input buffer or reading from an empty output buffer.

EXIT STATUS

       0
           One or more of the provided paths is ignored.

       1
           None of the provided paths are ignored.

       128
           A fatal error was encountered.

SEE ALSO

       gitignore(5) git-config(1) git-ls-files(1)

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite