Your editor always creates backup files under the name *.backup and you want to ignore them just like **/*~?
<defaultexcludes add="**/*.backup"/>
and it has become a default exclude pattern. You can even remove it again at a later point or reset the list of patterns to the built-in list (that still exists).
If you can't remember which patterns make up the default excludes, run
<defaultexcludes echo="true"/>
If you need to, you can also remove an item or three from the default excludes temporarily, like maybe...
<target name="dangerous-cvs-stuff"> <defaultexcludes remove="**/CVS"/> <defaultexcludes remove="**/CVS/**"/> <defaultexcludes remove="*.backup"/> <copy todir="../reposbackup"> <fileset dir="/usr/cvs/myRepos"/> </copy> <copy todir="../wdbackup"> <fileset dir="."/> </copy> <defaultexcludes default="true"/> <defaultexcludes add="**/*.backup"/> (do stuff with cvs task that you havn't tested yet) </target>