Mercurial accepts several notations for identifying one or more files

at a time.

By default, Mercurial treats filenames as shell-style extended glob

patterns.

Alternate pattern notations must be specified explicitly.

.. note::

  Patterns specified in ``.hgignore`` are not rooted.

  Please see :hg:`help hgignore` for details.

To use a plain path name without any pattern matching, start it with

``path:``. These path names must completely match starting at the

current repository root.

To use an extended glob, start a name with ``glob:``. Globs are rooted

at the current directory; a glob such as ``*.c`` will only match files

in the current directory ending with ``.c``.

The supported glob syntax extensions are ``**`` to match any string

across path separators and ``{a,b}`` to mean "a or b".

To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with ``re:``.

Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository.

To read name patterns from a file, use ``listfile:`` or ``listfile0:``.

The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line

feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file

pattern.

All patterns, except for ``glob:`` specified in command line (not for

``-I`` or ``-X`` options), can match also against directories: files

under matched directories are treated as matched.

Plain examples::

  path:foo/bar   a name bar in a directory named foo in the root

                 of the repository

  path:path:name a file or directory named "path:name"

Glob examples::

  glob:*.c       any name ending in ".c" in the current directory

  *.c            any name ending in ".c" in the current directory

  **.c           any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of the

                 current directory including itself.

  foo/*.c        any name ending in ".c" in the directory foo

  foo/**.c       any name ending in ".c" in any subdirectory of foo

                 including itself.

Regexp examples::

  re:.*\.c$      any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository

File examples::

  listfile:list.txt  read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line

  listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters

See also :hg:`help filesets`.