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