Software Voices

Subversion allows you to specify certain filenames that it will ignore when performing certain operations (like "svn status"). These are often temporary files that you do not want to have under revision control. Back in the CVS days this was fairly easy with a simple file named ".cvsignore" that you could edit.

With Subversion, however, I have to remember and type the following correctly and then use vi to add the name:


It looks simple, but it was so unintuitive it took me months to memorize it correctly and I still think it's ugly. Plus, I'm not particularly in love with vi, though I've been using it for over 20 years. I would much rather type something direct like:


so I wrote the following shell script which lets me do just that: