Re: Beginner problem with .gitignore

Kai Schlamp venit, vidit, dixit 21.04.2009 11:57:

Michael, thanks for the help. Comments below.

quoted

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

Yes, that is what I meant.

quoted

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.

That's for the case when you don't ignore that dir.

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.

The problem is the recursive way in which git applies those patterns.
Your patterns above mean that git never recurses into the subdirs.

In the example above, you probably want

/a_dir/b_dir/*
!/a_dir/b_dir/c_dir/

Cheers,
Michael

P.S.: Please don't cull cc: