The dropbox cli already lets you ignore folders. I've have had the following script for many years to ignore node_modules: exclude_folders=$(find . -type d -name "node_modules" | grep -v "node_modules/") echo "Excluding $exclude_folders" dropbox exclude add $exclude_folders dropbox exclude list The feature I want is pattern-based ignore in a .dropboxignore file.
I work on a major dropbox competitor. We have the ability to do regex-based ignores, but it's deliberately hidden. (And not part of any regression suite.) As we've optimized the product, regexes would cause a huge performance problem.
Why? Part of our optimization includes representing paths in an optimized data structure. In order to process the regex, each path would need to be converted back to its full string, which is computationally "expensive" when working with 20,000 or more files and folders.