Overview

When FSVS walks through your working copy it tries to find new (ie. not yet versioned) entries. Every new entry gets tested against the defined grouping patterns (in the given order!); if a pattern matches, the corresponding group is assigned to the entry, and no further matching is done.

See also entry statii.

Predefined group 1: 'ignore'

If an entry gets a group named 'ignore' assigned, it will not be considered for versioning.

This is the only really special group name.

Predefined group 2: 'take'

This group mostly specifies that no further matching is to be done, so that later ignore patterns are not tested.

Basically the 'take' group is an ordinary group like all others; it is just predefined, and available with a short-hand notation.

Why should I ignore files?

Ignore patterns are used to ignore certain directory entries, where versioning makes no sense. If you're versioning the complete installation of a machine, you wouldn't care to store the contents of /proc (see man 5 proc), or possibly because of security reasons you don't want /etc/shadow , /etc/sshd/ssh_host_*key , and/or other password- or key-containing files.

Ignore patterns allow you to define which directory entries (files, subdirectories, devices, symlinks etc.) should be taken, respectively ignored.

Why should I assign groups?

The grouping patterns can be compared with the auto-props feature of subversion; it allows automatically defining properties for new entries, or ignoring them, depending on various criteria.

For example you might want to use encryption for the files in your users' .ssh directory, to secure them against unauthorized access in the repository, and completely ignore the private key files:

Grouping patterns:

    group:ignore,/home/*/.ssh/id*
    group:encrypt,/home/*/.ssh/**

 And the $FSVS_CONF/groups/encrypt file would have a definition for the fsvs:commit-pipe (see the special properties).

Syntax of group files

A group definition file looks like this:

• Whitespace on the beginning and the end of the line is ignored.
• Empty lines, and lines with the first non-whitespace character being '#' (comments) are ignored.
• It can have either the keywords ignore or take; if neither is specified, the group ignore has ignore as default (surprise, surprise!), and all others use take.
• An arbitrary (small) number of lines with the syntax
  
   auto-prop property-name property-value can be given; property-name may not include whitespace, as there's no parsing of any quote characters yet. 

An example:

   # This is a comment
     # This is another
   auto-props    fsvs:commit-pipe    gpg -er [email protected]
   # End of definition

Specification of groups and patterns

While an ignore pattern just needs the pattern itself (in one of the formats below), there are some modifiers that can be additionally specified:

   [group:{name},][dir-only,][insens|nocase,][take,][mode:A:C,]pattern

 These are listed in the section Modifiers below.

These kinds of ignore patterns are available:

Shell-like patterns

These must start with ./, just like a base-directory-relative path. ? , * as well as character classes [a-z] have their usual meaning, and ** is a wildcard for directory levels.

You can use a backslash \ outside of character classes to match some common special characters literally, eg. \* within a pattern will match a literal asterisk character within a file or directory name. Within character classes all characters except ] are treated literally. If a literal ] should be included in a character class, it can be placed as the first character or also be escaped using a backslash.

Example for / as the base-directory

     ./[oa]pt
     ./sys
     ./proc/*
     ./home/**~

This would ignore files and directories called apt or opt in the root directory (and files below, in the case of a directory), the directory /sys and everything below, the contents of /proc (but take the directory itself, so that upon restore it gets created as a mountpoint), and all entries matching *~ in and below /home .

Note:

The patterns are anchored at the beginning and the end. So a pattern ./sys will match only a file or directory named sys. If you want to exclude a directories' files, but not the directory itself, use something like ./dir/* or ./dir/**

If you're deep within your working copy and you'd like to ignore some files with a WC-relative ignore pattern, you might like to use the rel-ignore command.

Absolute shell patterns

There is another way to specify shell patterns - using absolute paths.

 The syntax is similar to normal shell patterns; but instead of the ./ prefix the full path, starting with /, is used.

         /etc/**.dpkg-old
         /etc/**.dpkg-bak
         /**.bak
         /**~

The advantage of using full paths is that a later dump and load in another working copy (eg. when moving from versioning /etc to /) does simply work; the patterns don't have to be modified.

Internally this simply tries to remove the working copy base directory at the start of the patterns (on loading); then they are processed as usual.

If a pattern does not match the wc base, and neither has the wild-wildcard prefix /**, a warning is issued.

PCRE-patterns

PCRE stands for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions; you can read about them with man pcre (if the manpages are installed), and/or perldoc perlre (if perldoc is installed).

 If both fail for you, just google it.

These patterns have the form PCRE:{pattern}, with PCRE in uppercase.

An example:

     PCRE:./home/.*~

 This one achieves exactly the same as ./home/**~ .

Another example:

     PCRE:./home/[a-s]

This would match /home/anthony , /home/guest , /home/somebody and so on, but would not match /home/theodore .

One more:

     PCRE:./.*(.(tmp|bak|sik|old|dpkg-2">{</FONT>