possible feature, cp: respect .gitignore

[PThorpe92]

This feature was suggested in another discussion. Is adding an arg/flag to the cp command to enable respect of a .gitignore file something that the project would be interested in adding? If this is the case, I would like to attempt to implement this, but would have some questions about specifics of desired implementation.

[tertsdiepraam]

The question is what you want cp to do here. cp just copies the files it explicitly gets. That does not include globs. For example: say I have a.txt and b.txt and a.txt is in gitignore. Then cp *.txt will be expanded by the shell to cp a.txt b.txt. Hence there's no way for us to distinguish between cp a.txt b.txt and cp *.txt. Even with an option to ignore gitignore files, it seems weird to ignore files that are explicitly passed to cp. Another question is whether you want it to filter recursively. So if I have a folder with an ignored file and I cp that folder, should the ignored file be in the copy?

[PThorpe92]

This was an issue I had to deal with in another project. Because it's disabled by default, I feel the recursive option would be the main use case, e.g. copying a folder/.git repo, and wanting the .gitignored files to not be copied along with it. Much like when you push remote.
This and glob (cp * ./some/dir) would seem to me to be the most likely use-cases. It may not be a good fit though, just thought I would get some opinions.

[anoraktrend]

I think your request might be better suited for a shell to handle rather than cp.