Controlling Pattern-Matching with the exclude Options

Normally, a pattern matches a name if an initial subsequence of the name's components matches the pattern, where ‘*’, ‘?’, and ‘[...]’ are the usual shell wildcards, ‘\’ escapes wildcards, and wildcards can match ‘/’.

Other than optionally stripping leading ‘/’ from names (see absolute), patterns and names are used as-is. For example, trailing ‘/’ is not trimmed from a user-specified name before deciding whether to exclude it.

However, this matching procedure can be altered by the options listed below. These options accumulate. For example:

     --ignore-case --exclude='makefile' --no-ignore-case ---exclude='readme'

ignores case when excluding ‘makefile’, but not when excluding ‘readme’.

--anchored

--no-anchored

If anchored, a pattern must match an initial subsequence of the name's components. Otherwise, the pattern can match any subsequence. Default is --no-anchored.

--ignore-case

--no-ignore-case

When ignoring case, upper-case patterns match lower-case names and vice versa. When not ignoring case (the default), matching is case-sensitive.

--wildcards

--no-wildcards

When using wildcards (the default), ‘*’, ‘?’, and ‘[...]’ are the usual shell wildcards, and ‘\’ escapes wildcards. Otherwise, none of these characters are special, and patterns must match names literally.

--wildcards-match-slash

--no-wildcards-match-slash

When wildcards match slash (the default), a wildcard like ‘*’ in the pattern can match a ‘/’ in the name. Otherwise, ‘/’ is matched only by ‘/’.

The --recursion and --no-recursion options (see recurse) also affect how exclude patterns are interpreted. If recursion is in effect, a pattern excludes a name if it matches any of the name's parent directories.