Re: Beginner problem with .gitignore

Michael, thanks for the help. Comments below.

By "is ignored", do you mean that git status doesn't show it? 

Yes, that is what I meant.

git status does not recurse into subdirectories by default unless there 
is at least one tracked file inside.

Ok. I justed tested this a bit. Let's say I have the following directory 
structure: "/a_dir/b_dir/c_dir"

And have a .gitignore with:
/a_dir
!/a_dir/b_dir/c_dir/

Now i put a file "a_file" in "c_dir".
And add the a_file with "git add /a_dir/b_dir/c_dir/a_file". Yes, a_file 
is tracked now.

I would have expected (after your information above) that if I create 
another file "b_file" in "c_dir" and check "git status" that this file 
is on the untracked file list now.
But it doesn't show up.
And this makes it quite hard to exclude a whole folder, but only include 
one of it's subfolders. I use git gui for commits. And I like it that 
newly added files show up as untracked files.
But in this case those files in those subdiretories won't.

Best regards,
Kai