# git-check-ignore(1) Manual Page

## NAME

git-check-ignore - Debug gitignore / exclude files

## SYNOPSIS

    git check-ignore [options] pathname…​
    git check-ignore [options] --stdin < <list-of-paths>

## DESCRIPTION

For each pathname given via the command-line or from a file via `--stdin`, show the pattern from .gitignore (or other input files to the exclude mechanism) that decides if the pathname is excluded or included. Later patterns within a file take precedence over earlier ones.

By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not subject to exclude rules; but see ‘--no-index’.

## OPTIONS

-q, --quiet

  Don’t output anything, just set exit status. This is only valid with a single pathname.

-v, --verbose

  Also output details about the matching pattern (if any) for each given pathname.

--stdin

  Read file names from stdin instead of from the command-line.

-z

  The output format is modified to be machine-parseable (see below). If `--stdin` is also given, input paths are separated with a NUL character instead of a linefeed character.

-n, --non-matching

  Show given paths which don’t match any pattern. This only makes sense when `--verbose` is enabled, otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish between paths which match a pattern and those which don’t.

--no-index

  Don’t look in the index when undertaking the checks. This can be used to debug why a path became tracked by e.g. `git add .` and was not ignored by the rules as expected by the user or when developing patterns including negation to match a path previously added with `git add -f`.

## OUTPUT

By default, any of the given pathnames which match an ignore pattern will be output, one per line. If no pattern matches a given path, nothing will be output for that path; this means that path will not be ignored.

If `--verbose` is specified, the output is a series of lines of the form:

<source> <COLON> <linenum> <COLON> <pattern> <HT> <pathname>

<pathname> is the path of a file being queried, <pattern> is the matching pattern, <source> is the pattern’s source file, and <linenum> is the line number of the pattern within that source. If the pattern contained a `!` prefix or `/` suffix, it will be preserved in the output. <source> will be an absolute path when referring to the file configured by `core.excludesFile`, or relative to the repository root when referring to `.git/info/exclude` or a per-directory exclude file.

If `-z` is specified, the pathnames in the output are delimited by the null character; if `--verbose` is also specified then null characters are also used instead of colons and hard tabs:

<source> <NULL> <linenum> <NULL> <pattern> <NULL> <pathname> <NULL>

If `-n` or `--non-matching` are specified, non-matching pathnames will also be output, in which case all fields in each output record except for <pathname> will be empty. This can be useful when running non-interactively, so that files can be incrementally streamed to STDIN of a long-running check-ignore process, and for each of these files, STDOUT will indicate whether that file matched a pattern or not. (Without this option, it would be impossible to tell whether the absence of output for a given file meant that it didn’t match any pattern, or that the output hadn’t been generated yet.)

Buffering happens as documented under the `GIT_FLUSH` option in git(1). The caller is responsible for avoiding deadlocks caused by overfilling an input buffer or reading from an empty output buffer.

## EXIT STATUS

0

  One or more of the provided paths is ignored.

1

  None of the provided paths are ignored.

128

  A fatal error was encountered.

## SEE ALSO

gitignore(5) gitconfig(5) git-ls-files(1)

## GIT

Part of the git(1) suite