http://www.atd.ucar.edu/software/jcvs/manual/misc/ignorespec.html

There are many times during the operation of CVS that you wish to ignore certain files. For instance, if you were about to import your latest Java servlet, you would not wish to have the class files imported along with the source files.

To accomodate this problem, CVS defines ignore specs which describe files that are to be ignored. The ignore specs work much like the old "globbing" expressions used by some shells.

Ignore specs match file names, but they allow for two wildcard characters. The character '*' will match any number of any characters, and the '?' character will match any single character.

Ignore specs are separated by spaces. This is a problem for developers that allow spaces in their filenames.

Examples Here are some examples of CVS ignore specs.

*.class *.txt *.jar

This is a common ignore spec used by Java developers. It will ignore all
class files, all JAR files, and text files. Thus, all of the following files
would be ignored: Main.class, Utility.class, app.jar, notes.txt,
stackTrace.txt.

*.o *.a core *.so

This is a common ignore spec used by C developers. It will ignore all object
files, library files, shared library files, and core files.