NAME

       git-check-ignore - Debug gitignore / exclude files

SYNOPSIS

       git check-ignore [options] pathname...
       git check-ignore [options] --stdin < <list-of-paths>

DESCRIPTION

       For each pathname given via the command-line or from a file via --stdin, show the pattern
       from .gitignore (or other input files to the exclude mechanism) that decides if the
       pathname is excluded or included. Later patterns within a file take precedence over
       earlier ones.

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.

       --stdin
           Read file names from stdin 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) gitconfig(5) git-ls-files(1)

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite