Subject: Re: [PATCH] match_pathname(): give fnmatch one char of prefix context

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:28:11 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> Subject: match_pathname(): give fnmatch one char of prefix context
>
> In match_pathname(), which we use for matching .gitignore and
> .gitattribute patterns, we are comparing paths with with fnmatch

"with with" -> "with".

> patterns (actually our extended wildmatch, which will be important).
> There's an extra optimization there: we pre-compute the number of
> non-wildcard characters at the beginning of the pattern and do an
> fspathncmp() on that prefix.
>
> That lets us avoid fnmatch entirely on patterns without wildcards, and
> shrinks the amount of work we hand off to fnmatch. For a pattern like
> "foo*.txt" and a path "foobar.txt", we'd cut away the matching "foo"
> prefix and just pass "*.txt" and "bar.txt" to fnmatch().
>
> But this misses a subtle corner case. In fnmatch(), we'll think
> "bar.txt" is the start of the path, but it's not. This doesn't matter
> for the pattern above, but consider the wildmatch pattern "foo**/bar"
> and the path "foobar". These two should not match, because there is no
> file named "bar", and the "**" applies only to the containing directory
> name. But after removing the "foo" prefix, fnmatch will get "**/bar" and
> "bar", which it does consider a match, because "**/" can match zero
> directories.

Ouch.

> We can solve this by giving fnmatch a bit more context. As long as it
> has one byte of the matched prefix, then it will know that "bar" is not
> the start of the path. In this example it would get "o**/bar" and
> "obar", and realize that they cannot match.
>
> In the case that there are no wildcards at all (i.e., the whole prefix
> matches), we'll continue to return without running fnmatch at all. We
> just need to account for the extra byte in our adjusted lengths.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
> ---
> I wonder how much this prefix-matching buys us in practice. There are
> two cases that are helped:
>
>   1. When there is no wildcard in the pattern at all, we skip fnmatch
>      entirely.
>
>   2. We do a raw match of the prefix chars, shrinking the size of what
>      is passed to fnmatch.
>
> My suspicion is that most of the improvement comes from (1), and it
> would be very easy to retain that case and get rid of (2). But I haven't
> done any measuring.

The above matches my intuition as well.

> diff --git a/dir.c b/dir.c
> index 0a67a99cb3..764400d9c5 100644
> --- a/dir.c
> +++ b/dir.c
> @@ -1360,6 +1360,13 @@ int match_pathname(const char *pathname, int pathlen,
>  
>  		if (fspathncmp(pattern, name, prefix))
>  			return 0;
> +
> +		/*
> +		 * Retain one character of the prefix to
> +		 * pass to fnmatch, which lets it distinguish
> +		 * the start of a directory component correctly.
> +		 */
> +		prefix--;
>  		pattern += prefix;
>  		patternlen -= prefix;
>  		name    += prefix;

So, checking pattern "fo*o/bar" against "foo/bar", we'd use
"o*o/bar" to match "oo/bar", which is not necessary but our
conjecture is that feeding shorter fnmatch() is not buying
us much, which justifies this change.

If not, we could do a more targetted pessimization, perhaps like
this, ...

        /* the non-wildcard prefix does not match? */ 
	if (fspathncmp(pattern, name, prefix))
		return 0;

	/* the non-wildcard prefix is the whole thing? */
	if (namelen == prefix && patternlen == prefix)
		return 1;

	/* avoid making foo**/bar match foobar */
	if (3 <= prefix && memcmp(pattern, "**/", 3)
		prefix--;
	pattern += prefix;
	patternlen -= prefix;
	name += prefix;
	namelen -= prefix;

... but that is even more specific hack than yours.

> @@ -1370,7 +1377,7 @@ int match_pathname(const char *pathname, int pathlen,
>  		 * then our prefix match is all we need; we
>  		 * do not need to call fnmatch at all.
>  		 */
> -		if (!patternlen && !namelen)
> +		if (patternlen == 1 && namelen == 1)
>  			return 1;
>  	}

In any case, I do prefer doing this "our non-wildcard part matched
the whole thing, so let's return true" before stripping matching
prefix from the pattern and the name (like I showed earlier).

> diff --git a/t/t0008-ignores.sh b/t/t0008-ignores.sh
> index 273d71411f..db8bde280e 100755
> --- a/t/t0008-ignores.sh
> +++ b/t/t0008-ignores.sh
> @@ -847,6 +847,17 @@ test_expect_success 'directories and ** matches' '
>  	test_cmp expect actual
>  '
>  
> +test_expect_success '** not confused by matching leading prefix' '
> +	cat >.gitignore <<-\EOF &&
> +	foo**/bar
> +	EOF
> +	git check-ignore foobar foo/bar >actual &&
> +	cat >expect <<-\EOF &&
> +	foo/bar
> +	EOF
> +	test_cmp expect actual
> +'
> +
>  ############################################################################
>  #
>  # test whitespace handling