Smells of Misunderstanding in File Path Patterns within Dockerignore

Writing file path patterns is a common activity in software development, but the semantics of patterns are not common across developer tools. This fact leads to the following question: Do developers acknowledge such differences in the semantics of file path patterns? This paper presents our preliminary study to answer this question. We built a dataset of 246. dockerignore files collected from GitHub and mined them for smells of misunderstanding of the dockerignore semantics. Our initial analysis found such smells in 42 % of the dataset. This result may motivate further investigation into this problem.