--- a/mercurial/help/patterns.txt	Thu Dec 30 23:36:50 2010 -0600
+++ b/mercurial/help/patterns.txt	Thu Dec 23 15:12:24 2010 -0600
@@ -20,6 +20,11 @@
 To use a Perl/Python regular expression, start a name with ``re:``.
 Regexp pattern matching is anchored at the root of the repository.
 
+To read name patterns from a file, use ``listfile:`` or ``listfile0:``.
+The latter expects null delimited patterns while the former expects line
+feeds. Each string read from the file is itself treated as a file
+pattern.
+
 Plain examples::
 
   path:foo/bar   a name bar in a directory named foo in the root
@@ -39,3 +44,8 @@
 Regexp examples::
 
   re:.*\.c$      any name ending in ".c", anywhere in the repository
+
+File examples::
+
+  listfile:list.txt  read list from list.txt with one file pattern per line
+  listfile0:list.txt read list from list.txt with null byte delimiters