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Comment by fyp | Hacker News Reader

The dropbox cli already lets you ignore folders. I've have had the following script for many years to ignore node_modules:

  exclude_folders=$(find . -type d -name "node_modules" | grep -v "node_modules/")
  echo "Excluding $exclude_folders"
  dropbox exclude add $exclude_folders
  dropbox exclude list

The feature I want is pattern-based ignore in a .dropboxignore file.

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I work on a major dropbox competitor. We have the ability to do regex-based ignores, but it's deliberately hidden. (And not part of any regression suite.) As we've optimized the product, regexes would cause a huge performance problem.

Why? Part of our optimization includes representing paths in an optimized data structure. In order to process the regex, each path would need to be converted back to its full string, which is computationally "expensive" when working with 20,000 or more files and folders.

This is also true of the GUI. It's called Selective Sync

I’m finding it hard to understand how this new feature differs from Selective Sync.

Is there something this lets one do that couldn’t be done before? Or is it just adding convenience?

This is kind of the opposite. With Selective Sync, the file exists on Dropbox.com and 0 or more client devices, and each device can choose whether or not to sync the file. The new ignore feature allows a file to exist on one device without being uploaded or synced to other devices.

Try unselect node_modules in Selective Sync for ignoring purpose. Uh-oh, you just deleted node_modules in your machine.

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