What does "!" mean in file paths?

Question

I am reading over someone's gulpfile.js that I found, and came across an interesting character that I've not seen in file paths before; the ! symbol. I tried to do some searches for this but yielded nothing.

gulp.task("min:js", function () {
    gulp.src([paths.js, "!" + paths.minJs], { base: "." })
        .pipe(concat(paths.concatJsDest))
        .pipe(uglify())
        .pipe(gulp.dest("."));
});

Does the ! have some particular meaning, here?

Answer 1

I'm not an expert on Gulp, but a quick search shows that it tells gulp to ignore a given path.

Prepending a path with an exclamation mark tells Gulp to exclude that directory.

So, in your example, paths.minJs should be excluded from the task Gulp is performing.

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Actually it is used to negate a pattern, based on the answer to another question. That is, it is used to select what does not match the following pattern. As a consequence, it ignores the path in the pattern.