Pathspec fails to match directories if they don't end with a slash

[MischaPanch]

With a gitignore spec containing the line

ignore_dirs_like_this_*/

pathspec will match

"ignore_dirs_like_this/"

but not

"ignore_dirs_like_this"

I guess it's not intended behavior, right?

[cpburnz]

Thanks for the bug report.

Using a .gitignore of:

ignore_dirs_like_this*/

The command git check-ignore yields the following:

$ git check-ignore 'ignore_dirs_like_this/'
ignore_dirs_like_this/
$ git check-ignore 'ignore_dirs_like_this'
ignore_dirs_like_this

Which means both "ignore_dirs_like_this/" and "ignore_dirs_like_this" should both match. Testing with pathspec, I get the inconsistent results you reported:

>>> from pathspec import *
>>> spec = GitIgnoreSpec.from_lines(['ignore_dirs_like_this*/'])
>>> spec.match_file('ignore_dirs_like_this/')
True
>>> spec.match_file('ignore_dirs_like_this')
False

I need to look into this further.

[MischaPanch]

I fixed it in my downstream code by always appending / to paths that are existing directories (just something to consider)

[cpburnz]

I've looked into this more and there's a problem that's difficult to fix: there's not a good way to distinguish between files and directories as paths.

With the following .gitignore:

ignore_dirs_like_this/
ignore_files_like_this/

And directory structure:

ignore_dirs_like_this/a.txt
ignore_files_like_this

The directory is ignored (as you previous reported):

$ git check-ignore 'ignore_dirs_like_this/'
ignore_dirs_like_this/
$ git check-ignore 'ignore_dirs_like_this'
ignore_dirs_like_this

But the file is not ignored:

$ git check-ignore 'ignore_files_like_this'

Issue #65 encountered a similar issue where the solution was to append a "/" to the end of directories coming from a pathlib.Path. That's similar to the workaround you found.

After digging through the git history, this bug is 11 years old. Changing the code to match (ignore) a directory without a trailing slash will cause files with the same name to incorrectly match (be ignored). Since this bug is so old, I think it's safer to keep the current behavior.