# Creating a global ignore pattern

When synchronizing resources, often there are resources that you do not want to commit to the repository. The Workbench provides a global pattern matching facility for ignoring resources that can appear anywhere in your project hierarchy.

1. From the main menu bar, select Window > Preferences.
2. In the left pane of the Preferences window, expand the Team category and select Ignored Resources. This displays a list of resource name patterns against which resources will be screened, before they are considered as candidates for version control.
3. Click the Add push button and type the pattern that you want to match, for example `*.obj`.
4. Click OK.

All files with an extension that matches the pattern that you added will be excluded from version control.

The patterns that you define may contain the wildcard characters * and ?. The asterisk represents any sequence of zero or more characters, the question mark represents a single character. For example, you can specify a pattern of `*~`, which would match any temporary files that end with a tilde (~). Any file or directory that matches any one of the patterns will be ignored when files are being considered for version control. You can temporarily disable ignoring the resource name pattern by deselecting it from the list. You do not have to remove the specified pattern from the list.

It is important to note that the path leading up to the resource name is not included in the matching. For example, for the file "/path/to/file.txt", only the string "file.txt" is matched against the patterns. This facility is not intended for specifying fully-qualified path names but for specifying globally applicable patterns.

Team programming with CVS

Version control life cycle: adding and ignoring resources
Overriding or removing resource ignore patterns
Synchronizing with the repository