For each pathname given via the command -line or from a file via --stdin ,check whether the file is excluded by .gitignore (or other input files to the exclude mechanism) and output the path if it is excluded . By default, tracked files are not shown at all since they are not subject to exclude rules; but see --no -index .
-q, --quiet Don output anything, just set exit status . This is only valid with a single pathname .
-v, --verbose Also output details about the matching pattern (if any) for each given pathname . For precedence rules within and between exclude sources, see gitignore (5).
--stdin Read pathnames from the standard input, one per line, instead of from the command -line .
-z The output format is modified to be machine -parseable (see below) . If --stdin is also given, input paths are separated with a NUL character instead of a linefeed character .
-n, --non -matching Show given paths which don match any pattern . This only makes sense when --verbose is enabled, otherwise it would not be possible to distinguish between paths which match a pattern and those which don .
--no -index Don look in the index when undertaking the checks . This can be used to debug why a path became tracked by e .g . gitadd . and was not ignored by the rules as expected by the user or when developing patterns including negation to match a path previously added with gitadd -f .
By default, any of the given pathnames which match an ignore pattern will be output, one per line . If no pattern matches a given path, nothing will be output for that path; this means that path will not be ignored . If --verbose is specified, the output is a series of lines of the form: <source> <COLON> <linenum> <COLON> <pattern> <HT> <pathname> <pathname> is the path of a file being queried, <pattern> is the matching pattern, <source> is the pattern source file, and <linenum> is the line number of the pattern within that source . If the pattern contained a ! prefix or / suffix, it will be preserved in the output . <source> will be an absolute path when referring to the file configured by core.excludesFile ,or relative to the repository root when referring to .git/info/exclude or a per -directory exclude file . If -z is specified, the pathnames in the output are delimited by the null character; if --verbose is also specified then null characters are also used instead of colons and hard tabs: <source> <NULL> <linenum> <NULL> <pattern> <NULL> <pathname> <NULL> If -n or --non -matching are specified, non -matching pathnames will also be output, in which case all fields in each output record except for <pathname> will be empty . This can be useful when running non -interactively, so that files can be incrementally streamed to STDIN of a long -running check -ignore process, and for each of these files, STDOUT will indicate whether that file matched a pattern or not . (Without this option, it would be impossible to tell whether the absence of output for a given file meant that it didn match any pattern, or that the output hadn been generated yet .) Buffering happens as documented under the GIT_FLUSH option in git (1). The caller is responsible for avoiding deadlocks caused by overfilling an input buffer or reading from an empty output buffer .