I'm trying to use hledger rewrite to rewrite postings which match certain tags combinations. I would like to run hledger rewrite several times without adding additional rewrites.

To this end, I thought I can add the tag "rewritten" to the rewritten posting and ignore them in the query of the rewrite rule. But in my environment this is not working as I would expect it to.

Given the following sample.ledger file:

2018/4/1 * test
    ; details:beer
    a  2
    b
2018/4/1 * another test
    ; details:food
    a  20
    b

and the following sample.rewrite file

= a tag:details=beer not:tag:rewritten
    a  *-1 ; rewritten:
    c  *1

The hledger rewrite -f sample.journal -f sample.rewrite| hledger print -f - gives:

2018/04/01 * test
    ; details:beer
    a               2
    b
    a              -2    ; rewritten:
    c               2
2018/04/01 * another test
    ; details:food
    a              20
    b

However, hledger rewrite -f sample.journal -f sample.rewrite|hledger print -f -|hledger rewrite -f - -f sample.rewrite gives

2018/04/01 * test
    ; details:beer
    a               2
    b
    a              -2    ; rewritten:
    c               2
    a              -2    ; rewritten:
    c               2
2018/04/01 * another test
    ; details:food
    a              20
    b

I would have expected that the posting with details:beer and tag:rewritten would not match a second time.

Am I missing something here?

PS: Thanks to all involved in the development of hledger from a happy user.