Fossil

## Platform Quirks

Fossil glob patterns are based on the glob pattern feature of POSIX
shells. Fossil glob patterns also have a quoting mechanism, discussed
above. Because other parts of your operating system may interpret glob
patterns and quotes separately from Fossil, it is often difficult to
give glob patterns correctly to Fossil on the command line. Quotes and
special characters in glob patterns are likely to be interpreted when
given as part of a `fossil` command, causing unexpected behavior.

These problems do not affect [versioned settings
files](/doc/trunk/www/settings.wiki) or Admin → Settings in Fossil
UI. Consequently, it is better to set long-term `*-glob` settings via
these methods than to use `fossil settings` commands.

That advice doesn't help you when you are giving one-off glob patterns

Beware that Fossil's `--ignore` option doesn't override explicit file
mentions:

    $ fossil add --ignore 'REALLY SECRET STUFF.txt' RE*

You might think that would add everything beginning with `RE` *except*
for `REALLY SECRET STUFF.txt`, but when a file is both given explicitly
to Fossil and also matches an ignore rule, Fossil asks what you want to
do with it in the default case; it doesn't even ask if you gave the `-f`
or `--force` option along with `--ignore`.

The spaces in the ignored file name above bring us to another point:
such file names must be quoted in Fossil glob patterns, lest Fossil
interpret it as multiple glob patterns, but the shell interprets
quotation marks itself.

One way to fix both this and the previous problem is:

    $ fossil add --ignore "'REALLY SECRET STUFF.txt'" READ*

The nested quotation marks cause the inner set to be passed through to
Fossil, and the more specific glob pattern at the end — that is,
`READ*` vs `RE*` — avoids a conflict between explicitly-listed
files and `--ignore` rules in the `fossil add` command.

Another solution would be to use shell escaping instead of nested
quoting:

    $ fossil add --ignore "\"REALLY SECRET STUFF.txt\"" READ*

It bears repeating that the two glob patterns here are not interpreted

Windows' obsolete [Services for Unix
3.*x*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX) feature,
or the [Windows Subsystem for
Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux). (The
latter is sometimes incorrectly called "Bash on Windows" or "Ubuntu on
Windows.") See the POSIX Systems section above for those cases.)

For example, consider how you would set `crlf-glob` to `*` in order to
disable Fossil's "looks like a binary file" checks. The naïve
approach will not work:

    C:\...> fossil setting crlf-glob *

The C runtime library will expand that to the list of all files in the
current directory, which will probably cause a Fossil error because
Fossil expects either nothing or option flags after the setting's new
value.