Thank you for reporting this.

If you add files via --ignore-file, the patterns are always matched relative to the current working directory (we should document this). So your dir1/file1.txt example should work if dir1 is in the current directory.

This behavior is inherited from the ignore crate, which is also used in ripgrep. I think the intention behind this is that there is no "repository root" for these custom ignore files, so using the current working directory seems like a reasonable choice. However, I agree that it is unexpected that dir1/file1.txt does not match another-folder/dir1/file1.txt.

I'm not sure, if there is an easy way to change this, though.

Interesting! The current working directory thing makes it so fd -t f "" repo/ expects the --ignore-file to say repo/dir1/file1.txt. In other words, current working directory means the directory fd was called from, not the target directory passed as an argument.

So the temporary workaround for scripting use would be to cd repo/ && fd -t f "" . instead.

This might be related to BurntSushi/ripgrep#278 and BurntSushi/ripgrep#829. Which are both bugs caused by the same behaviour in the ignore library, where it uses the current working directory places it shouldn't.