Server not honoring .plexignore

Plex Media Server
22

In your case, you should be able to use */* in the .plexignore in"Original" to cause it to ignore any files in it and its sub-directories.

All its sub-directorys? Or only one level down? I’m struggling to understand the semantics of your pattern match language if */* somehow works multiple levels down, but * does not. And I’m still trying to figure out why ./* did not work at all, since . is the name of the current directory.

23

I’m not sure it’s unlimited, but I just performed another test on my system and it works for at least three levels. That is:

TV/    <--- Library points here
     Show Name/    <--- .plexignore with `*/*` in it lives here
          Season 6/
               Show Name - S06E01.mkv
               Original/   <--- Extra directory level
                    /Show Name - S06E01.mkv
                    AnotherLevel/   <--- Third directory level
                         /Show Name - S06E01.mkv

With no .plexignore file, a scan results in three copies of Show Name season 6 episode 1. After adding .plexignore with */*, a scan trashes all 3 copies.

As for the semantics, Plex is using their own. It’s not exactly regular expression matching.

1 Like
24

As for the semantics, Plex is using their own. It’s not exactly regular expression matching.

That much is clear. Which is weird. It’s pretty easy to write tree traversal and pattern matching functions in pretty much any modern language (or even ancient ones still in common use).

Oh well. As I said near the top, putting a .plexignore in every directory that has files to be ignored works fine. And with Linux, at least, there only needs to be one file with links to it from wherever it’s needed. And it wouldn’t be right to complain about the implementation details of a piece of software that’s made freely available.

25

Another option - I don’t know that it’s better or easier - I frequently chmod 000 [blah] or chgrp no-plex [blah] files and directories to temporarily hide them from Plex.

1 Like
26

I personally like that option; using normal Unix permissions ensures deterministic results.

27

Heh. Any software solution ensures deterministic results. It’s just not always easy to determine what those results will be without access to the source code. :slight_smile:

28

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