Excluding *New* Content with .plexignore?

General Discussions
1

Hi,

from the help file:

Excluding New Content with .plexignore

I have several folders which I put in a .plexignore (as a hidden file on *nix based PMS and with hidden attribute on windows ntfs file system PMS).

The content of the .plexignore is either *.* or just *, because I did not figure out how it would ignore ALL files and (sub)folders inside the folder, containing the .plexignore file.
Plex seems to ignore the .plexignore file or its contents.

2½ Questions:

  1. When I want to ignore everything inside a folder, what do I have to put inside the .plexignore?
    *.* or * or something else?

  2. How do I ignore everything inside a folder, which has been already scanned into a library by plex?

Thank you!

2

It’s been some time since I played with .plexignore files… so I might be slightly off.

regarding #1:

# ignore all content of all subfolders
*/*

# ignore all content of that folder
*

# ignores a subfolder called "new-stuff"
new-stuff/*

Regarding #2:
You cannot do that as plexignore-rules apply to all content of a folder – Plex doesn’t distinguish by when a file has been added or if it has already been scanned before.
Not sure I fully get your question… once a file has been scanned, Plex will not add another record when it re-scans the folder (if that’s what your question is aiming at)

1 Like
3

Thank you very much, I will test your suggestions and will come back with the result.

To clarify #2:
I was wondering, if already indexed files/folders will be removed from a library, when I add a .plexignore after plex has already indexed that files/folders.

Example:

Plex has scanned and indexed:

/folder/music1/files…
/folder/music2/files…
/folder/music3/files…

Now I put a .plexignore into
/folder/music2/

what will happen to the indexed files/folders when I rescan the library?

Will they be removed from the index or stay?

I expect they’ll removed, like

/folder/music1/files…
/folder/music3/files…

but my tests proved me wrong (but that was with maybe wrong content of .plexignore, so I will test again).

4

If you tell Plex to ignore those folders, it will no longer find the already indexed content. Therefore Plex should remove the files or at least flag them as “unavailable”

5

@tom80H

actually, when reading your post (regarding #1) again,

I see, I have to enter those 2 lines

*
*/*

into the .plexignore.

First line * for ignoring the folder itself, containing the .plexignore
and
second line */* for ignoring the folders subfolders.

That way, ALL content of this folder will be ignored.

Man, I really wish, the documentation would have had examples for my usecase…

6

What do you want to exclude?
You described a use case to ignore the entire content of a folder and its subfolders… so that’s what we went for.

7

Exactly what you’ve describe below.

…it took me some time to realize that 2 lines are nescessary to accomplish a simple “ignore all”. :slight_smile:

8

You could put the .plexignore file one level up and have a one-line statement like

folder-to-be-excluded/*
9

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