Ignore Certain Entries in a File

[truensado]

Just as the title says, I want something similar to modify_ where you can change certain parts of a file but rather I want to ignore certain parts of a file. This way if things like timestamps, links, or even version number get changed by an application, Chezmoi wouldn't ask me to apply the change forcing me to change that entry in my source file. Ideally it would be using templating like {{ .ignore }} so that any value can replace that part. If there is already a method I haven't figured it out.

[halostatue]

I can't think of any way that this would work without adding significant complexity that would make change detection overall in chezmoi far less reliable.

I haven't dug deeply into chezmoi's change detection, but if I were doing it I would compute a digest (MD5 would be sufficient, but SHA2-256 is cheap and cheerful in 2025) of the contents of the file, the filename, and some metadata (mostly permissions, but explicitly excluding *time structures). What you're wanting is a way, for some files, to override that digest generation which would require an understanding of the structure of those files to explicitly exclude those sections.

In a well-structured configuration file (something that's TOML, YAML, XML, or JSON) that wouldn't be easy, but most of the files that a modify_-like script will be used on would require custom parsers for each file because they're improperly used as both configuration and run-state. Even with some XML "configuration files" — especially those for Java programs — they are simply serialized versions of current class state rather than a proper configuration file.

[truensado]

Alright thanks anyways.

[twpayne]

Check out https://github.com/VorpalBlade/chezmoi_modify_manager.