WIP: Add dot_ignore file functionality to ignore specified patterns #5

Add support for dot ignore files (like: .gitignore)

File name is .gcpignore by default, and could be changed using -i or --ignore

Note: this doesn't support the syntax starting with ! to exclude some special patterns from the old defined ones.

Hi Ahmed,

Thank you so much for your contribution, it is much appreciated!

My first remark is that -i is already a GNU cp option (--interactive);
since a long-term goal of GCP is to have CLI compatibility with GNU cp, I would
like to find something else.

Regarding your design, I like the idea of being able to exclude dotfiles, but I
think it would be even better to implement generic exclude/include option, like
rsync does:

--exclude=PATTERN       exclude files matching PATTERN
--exclude-from=FILE     read exclude patterns from FILE
--include=PATTERN       don't exclude files matching PATTERN
--include-from=FILE     read include patterns from FILE

(rsync's --files-from=FILE would also be a nice feature to have at some
point.)

I'm not saying that we should implement all of these at once, but do you think
you could change your code to an implementation of --exclude-from? You
would then call gcp --exclude-from=.gcpignore or something like that.

If we then implement --exclude, we could use --exclude='.*' to ignore all
dotfiles, just like with rsync.

We don't have to handle the whole rsync pattern language right now, we can
start with a basic language that matches files in the directory being copied,
like you did in your code.

Thoughts?

Matteo

Hi Matteo,

Sorry for being late, and thank you for your notes.

I just have a comment about the convention, the idea is to have some feature like Git's .gitignore files, but the flag --exclude-from=FILE suggests that you should provide some specific file path, but actually it searches for that file name into each directory while walking deep, and exclude files with the specified patterns relatively to the directory which contains the file. Exactly like what we do do with .gitignore file.

Don't you think that --exclude-from=FILE will be confusing somehow.
Anyway I've updated it to --exclude-from, If we just can find more expressive name 😄