How does one escape a special character in syncthing ignore rules?

I’m new here, so I can’t reply to https://pulse-forum.ind.ie/t/excluding-files-from-synchronization-ignoring/80 .

I’m syncing files between Windows and Mac, and Syncthing on Windows refuses to sync files that contain the colon (":") character (for obvious reasons; the colon character cannot be used in Windows file names). As a result, the Syncthing UI is flooded with warning messages, e.g., “File name “Project/Identity/Flyers : Posters/Sunday Party” contains invalid characters; marked as invalid.”

How does one exclude files that contain the colon character, so that Syncthing doesn’t complain about every single file that contains invalid characters every time it attempts to sync the repository?

To take it a step further, I would like to ignore all files that contain invalid characters on Windows: / ? < > \ : * | "

But, of course, two of these characters (? *) have special meaning in the context of Syncthing’s .stignore file, and unless “escaped”, would cause undesirable behavior. Is there a mechanism for escaping these characters so that they can be matched literally?

Or is this type of ignoring not even necessary, i.e., because Syncthing implements its own internal mechanism for dealing with such files?

I would really appreciate any additional insight regarding these aspects of Syncthing’s ignore rules.

Currently, no. There should be. Mind filing it?

It does, but the result is that you get flooded by complaints as you already noticed… :confused: