<html lang="en"> <head> <title>Motivation For Ignore Lists - Stow</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"> <meta name="description" content="Stow"> <meta name="generator" content="makeinfo 4.13"> <link title="Top" rel="start" href="index.html#Top"> <link rel="up" href="Ignore-Lists.html#Ignore-Lists" title="Ignore Lists"> <link rel="prev" href="Ignore-Lists.html#Ignore-Lists" title="Ignore Lists"> <link rel="next" href="Types-And-Syntax-Of-Ignore-Lists.html#Types-And-Syntax-Of-Ignore-Lists" title="Types And Syntax Of Ignore Lists"> <link href="http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/" rel="generator-home" title="Texinfo Homepage"> <!-- This manual describes GNU Stow version 2.2.2 (9 November 2015), a program for managing the installation of software packages. Software and documentation is copyrighted by the following: (C) 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 Bob Glickstein <bobg+stow@zanshin.com> (C) 2000, 2001 Guillaume Morin <gmorin@gnu.org> (C) 2007 Kahlil (Kal) Hodgson <kahlil@internode.on.net> (C) 2011 Adam Spiers <stow@adamspiers.org> Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the section entitled ``GNU General Public License'' is included with the modified manual, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation. --> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"> <style type="text/css"><!-- pre.display { font-family:inherit } pre.format { font-family:inherit } pre.smalldisplay { font-family:inherit; font-size:smaller } pre.smallformat { font-family:inherit; font-size:smaller } pre.smallexample { font-size:smaller } pre.smalllisp { font-size:smaller } span.sc { font-variant:small-caps } span.roman { font-family:serif; font-weight:normal; } span.sansserif { font-family:sans-serif; font-weight:normal; } --></style> </head> <body> <div class="node"> <a name="Motivation-For-Ignore-Lists"></a> <p> Next: <a rel="next" accesskey="n" href="Types-And-Syntax-Of-Ignore-Lists.html#Types-And-Syntax-Of-Ignore-Lists">Types And Syntax Of Ignore Lists</a>, Previous: <a rel="previous" accesskey="p" href="Ignore-Lists.html#Ignore-Lists">Ignore Lists</a>, Up: <a rel="up" accesskey="u" href="Ignore-Lists.html#Ignore-Lists">Ignore Lists</a> <hr> </div> <h3 class="section">4.1 Motivation For Ignore Lists</h3> <p>In many situations, there will exist files under the package directories which it would be undesirable to stow into the target directory. For example, files related version control such as <samp><span class="file">.gitignore</span></samp>, <samp><span class="file">CVS</span></samp>, <samp><span class="file">*,v</span></samp> (RCS files) should typically not have symlinks from the target tree pointing to them. Also there may be files or directories relating to the build of the package which are not needed at run-time. <p>In these cases, it can be rather cumbersome to specify a <samp><span class="option">--ignore</span></samp> parameter for each file or directory to be ignored. This could be worked around by ensuring the existence of <samp><span class="file">~/.stowrc</span></samp> containing multiple <samp><span class="option">--ignore</span></samp> lines, or if a different set of files/directories should be ignored depending on which stow package is involved, a <samp><span class="file">.stowrc</span></samp> file for each stow package, but this would require the user to ensure that they were in the correct directory before invoking stow, which would be tedious and error-prone. Furthermore, since Stow shifts parameters from <samp><span class="file">.stowrc</span></samp> onto ARGV at run-time, it could clutter up the process table with excessively long parameter lists, or even worse, exceed the operating system's limit for process arguments. <p><a name="index-ignore-lists-16"></a>Therefore in addition to <samp><span class="option">--ignore</span></samp> parameters, Stow provides a way to specify lists of files and directories to ignore. <!-- =========================================================================== --> </body></html>