How can I ignore everything under a folder in Mercurial

Both of those will also filter out a directory called cabin, which might not be what you want. If you're filtering top-level, you can use:

^/bin/

For bin directories below your root, you can omit the ^. There is no need to specify syntax, regexp is the default.

Alternately:

syntax: glob
bin/**

I did some experiments and I found that the regex syntax on Windows applies to the path starting with the current repository, with backslashes transformed to slashes.

So if your repository is in E:\Dev for example, hg status will apply the patterns against foo/bar/file1.c and such. Anchors apply to this path.

So:

• Glob applies to path elements and is rooted to element parts
• foo matches any folder (or file) named foo (not to "foobar" nor "barfoo")
• *foo* matches any folder or file with "foo" in the name
• foo/bar* matches all files in "foo" folder starting with "bar"

• Regex is case sensitive, not anchored
• Of course, backslash regex special characters like . (dot)
• / matches \ path separator on Windows. \ doesn't match this separator...
• foo matches all files and folders with "foo" inside
• foo/ matches only folders ending with "foo"
• /foo/ matches the folder "foo" somewhere in the path
• /foo/bar/ matches the folder "bar" in the folder "foo" somewhere in the path
• ^foo matches file or folder starting by foo at the root of the repository
• foo$ matches file ending with foo

I hope this will help, I found the HGIGNORE(5) page a bit succinct.