On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 05:40:42PM +0800, Jason Heeris wrote: > On 15 October 2012 17:30, Stefan Sperling <s...@elego.de> wrote: > > The square brackets are wildcard syntax saying "match any of the characters > > listed within the brackets". This is part of the syntax of the fnmatch() > > standard C function > > Oh, that makes sense now. That's not the first time I've been bitten > by using square brackets in my filenames, but oh well. >
Another possibly slightly unclear aspect of prefix matching (i.e. without --pattern) is that only entire path components are matched. That is, if you use this prefix: /specs/[01234] A file called '/specs/1 foo bar.pdf' won't match, but any file within a directory called '/specs/[01234]/' would match, as would the file literally called '/specs/[01234]'. In all these cases the square brackets don't carry special meaning because the --pattern option isn't used. > It might be good to document that a bit better though, I don't think > it's in the SVN book or the help text. I agree! Please feel free to make suggestions. You can send us your proposed changes with relatively little effort. To enhance the help text, check out a copy of Subversion's trunk from https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk and edit the appropriate section of the file subversion/svndumpfilter/main.c. Then run 'svn diff' on the working copy, redirect the output to a file, and send this file as an attachment to the dev@ list. See for details: http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/general.html#patches If editing C source code is too technical, feel free to simply send an edited version of the output of 'svndumpfilter help exclude'. You can redirect the output to a file for editing purposes: svndumpfilter help exclude > help-exclude.txt Somebody else can then embed these changes in the C source files. The SVNbook has a separate web site with instructions for contributors, see: http://svnbook.org To get you started, here's a help text snippet I wrote to describe fnmatch-style pattern matching in the help text of 'svn log' for a new --search option in Subversion 1.8. Something similar could be done for 'svndumpfilter help exclude' and 'svndumpfilter help include'. log: Show the log messages for a set of revision(s) and/or path(s). usage: 1. log [PATH][@REV] 2. log URL[@REV] [PATH...] [... Some help text omitted here ...] If the --search option is used, log messages are displayed only if the provided search pattern matches any of the author, date, log message text (unless --quiet is used), or, if the --verbose option is also provided, a changed path. The search pattern may include "glob syntax" wildcards: ? matches any single character * matches a sequence of arbitrary characters [abc] matches any of the characters listed inside the brackets If multiple --search options are provided, a log message is shown if it matches any of the provided search patterns. If the --search-and option is used, that option's argument is combined with the pattern from the previous --search or --search-and option, and a log message is shown only if it matches the combined search pattern. If --limit is used in combination with --search, --limit restricts the number of log messages searched, rather than restricting the output to a particular number of matching log messages.
