Mercurial hg status displaying ignored files

Question

Can anyone tell me why mercurial is displaying ignored files for the 'hg status' command?

Here's the confirmation that mercurial is indeed ignoring the files:

$ hg addremove
$ hg commit 
nothing changed     

Now, have a look at the status output. I ran this immediately after the lines above. (Prinout is partial, with identifiable text removed)

$ hg status
? Core/target/Core-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-tests.jar
? Core/target/Core-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
? Core/target/classes/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/X.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XBackup.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XBackupInput.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XBackupOutput.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XImpl$GetResultsAndStatistics.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XImpl$MonitoringMode.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XImpl$UpdateMode.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XImpl.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XIsFullException.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XSource.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/XUsageException.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/CheckResults.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/Noise.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/DateTimeGenerator$TemporalMeasure.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/DateTimeGenerator.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/LoggingConfigurator.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/ManagedIterator.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/NetworkUtils.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/StackTraceUtils.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/Summarisable.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/TimingUtils.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/XMLStaticStringUtils.class
? Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/core/Zipper.class
...

There's something like a thousand lines of these ignored files showing in the status printout; that's some serious guff.

How can I get rid of this?

Thanks

UPDATE:

Here's my .hgignore file.

syntax:glob
.metadata*

syntax:regexp
^target.*$
^[^/]*/target.*$
^[^/]*/[^/]*/target.*$
^bin.*$
^[^/]*/bin.*$
^[^/]*/[^/]*/bin.*$

UPDATE:

Modified regexps a wee bit * -> .*

Answer 1

Your regexp syntax is wrong. You have this:

syntax:regexp
^target*$

which means "ignore anything beginning with target and ending with an asterisk

Which fails to ignore these:

Core/target/classes/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
Core/target/classes/xxx/yyy/zzz/X.class

for two reasons -- they begin with Core/ not target and they don't end with an asterisk.

What you probably meant was this:

syntax:regexp
^.*/target/.*$

which matches anything that has /target/ in it (notice it's .* in a regexp * is for glob style). However the ^ and $ only serve to root your regex and you don't want it rooted -- you want to find it anywhere in the string, so just do this:

syntax:regexp
/target/

The clue in all this was that the files were marked with ? which means not ignored and not added, if they were ignored you wouldn't see them at all without adding --ignored to the status command.

Answer 2

I got similar issue because I changed letter case for some files. So previously I got file called "sitenav.ext", renamed it to "siteNav.ext" and started to have same sort of issues - when I tried to "hg st" I got "? siteNav.ext". Fix was easy rename to "_siteNav.ext", addremove, commit, rename back to "siteNav.ext", addremove, commit -> profit!

Answer 3

As commented by Jerome in the question, providing your config might help.

One (admittedly strange) reason for your problem could be a permission issue with the .hgignore file combined with exclude defaults for the addremove command.

I could reproduce your situation by revoking any read permission from the ignore file and by using -X "**/target/**" as a default option for the addremove command (which might be set in any of the possible Mercurial configuration files):

$ hg st
# no output, as expected
$ chmod 000 .hgignore
$ hg addremove # with '-X "**/target/**"' set as default somewhere
$ hg commit 
nothing changed  
$ hg st
? Core/target/Core-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-tests.jar
? Core/target/Core-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
...

hg fails in reading the ignore file and thus does not know that the target stuff should be ignored. A corresponding warning from hg would be helpful here.

This question has been updated in response to Jerome's comment.

Answer 4

Many thanks for everyone's help on this. I haven't found an answer to the problem but I did find a workaround that got rid of it. So I'm assuming that at some point when modifying the hgignore regexps mercurial got confused and corrupted it's internal data... or something. I don't know enough internals to know what this could have been.

Anyway, should you find yourself in the same boat, here's what I did:

1. Make sure your .hgignore file says what you want it to and that all the files turning up in the hg status are the ones you want to ignore.
2. Add all the files to be ignored. hg addremove doesn't work because it does honour the hgignore contents, so I used Eclipse's hg plugin and did each file manually (well, I selected them all and Eclipse applied the add to them all individually).

3. Revert all added files. I used the following because I'm on linux. (thanks to another poster on a separate question here on SO - which I can now no longer find unfortunately)

   hg status -an0 | xargs -0 hg revert

4. repeat the above step until it no longer works. In my case this was sometimes up to as many as 3 reverts in a row! (No idea what it was actually doing though :( )

5. commit

You should now no longer see the ignored files in the hg status output.

I'm sorry, I have no idea why this worked, or what the original problem was. If anyone does, I'd be very interested to know your thoughts.

Many thanks again to everyone :)