CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsgitsymlinkgitignore
Magnus Johansson
Magnus Johansson

Reputation: 28325

How to get Git on Windows to ignore symbolic links

I can't get this to work.

I have cloned a repository that has a dummy file (named src): /path/src.

On Windows I have created a symbolic link: mklink -d /path/src /otherplace/src (but I of course had to delete the dummy src file first).
In both my .gitignore and .git/info/exclude I have 

/path/src/ 
/path/src 
path/src/
path/src

And I have tried 

git ls-files -s | gawk '/120000/{print $4}'

git update-index path/src/ --assume-unchanged

but I still get: 

error: readlink("path/src"): Function not implemented
error: unable to index file path/src   
fatal: updating files failed

I have tried all these other suggestions. And even this doesn't work.
Any ideas?

Upvotes: 17

Views: 6802

Answers (3)

Tokenyet
Tokenyet

Reputation: 4281

Here are my steps for this issue, similar, but a bit different from other answers.

Let's say I had a folder .fvm contain file.json and flutter_sdk(link) that all commited in git before, then I want to ignore out flutter_sdk.

  1. Add .fvm/flutter_sdk and .fvm/flutter_sdk/ in .gitignore.
  2. Cut .fvm/flutter_sdk out to other place than the repository.
  3. git add . and git commit ....
  4. Paste back the link.

Upvotes: 1

BruceJo
BruceJo

Reputation: 771

I know this is late, but I ran into this issue.

In my case, I apparently had checked in my symlink at some point. So no matter what I did, .gitignore would not work (I think that is what Alexandre was getting at).

REPAIR:

  1. Remove all symlinks
  2. See if git now thinks there are deleted files to commit.
  3. If so, then go ahead and commit the deletions.

Now you can re-add your symlinks and .gitignore should work.

Upvotes: 3

Alexandre Marcondes
Alexandre Marcondes

Reputation: 5969

You can do a checkout ignoring this single file like this:

git checkout HEAD . --no path/src

The .gitignore file only works for adding stuff to the index. Even a modifications on files commited before adding it to the .gitignore are not ignored.

Upvotes: 3

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