Mercurial .hgignore regular expression

Question

Using Mercurial, I need to ignore all files and directories except directories "tests" and "languages" and files in those directories. That all must be done with regex and .hgignoere

Files:

• tests\junk.txt
• cms\tests\some_file.txt
• cms\languages\users\lang.txt
• languages\lang2.txt
• tests.txt
• proba/tests.txt

I tried with this:

^(?!test|test/|test$|languages|languages/|languages$)

but this only matches the files that starts with test and language:

• tests\junk.txt
• languages\lang2.txt

What I want is to matches also

• cms\tests\some_file.txt
• cms\languages\users\lang.txt

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Use globs, they're simpler:

C:> dir
tests  languages pr0n espionage more_pr0n

C:> type .hgignore
syntax: glob
pr0n/*
espionage/*
more_pr0n/*

added: If you are concerned that there will be new directories that won't be ignored then you should:

hg add .hgignore
hg commit 
echo "new_directory/*" >> .hgignore
hg commit

If you have too many directories and files popping up in your source directory for this method to work, make a source-only directory.