CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgitignore
Daisy Sophia Hollman
Daisy Sophia Hollman

Reputation: 6296

Is there a way to tell git to only include certain files instead of ignoring certain files?

My programs generally generate huge output files (~1 GB) which I do not want to be backing up to the git repository. So instead of being able to do

git add .

I have to do something like

git add *.c *.cc *.f *.F *.C *.h *.cu

which is a little bit cumbersome...

I feel fairly confident I could write a quicky perl script ls the directory contents into .gitignore and then remove files based on a .gitinclude (or some similar name) file, but that seems a little too hackish. Is there a better way?

Upvotes: 226

Views: 132891

Answers (7)

Andre Greeff
Andre Greeff

Reputation: 211

I've seen a number of suggestions for the initial "ignore everything" rule, both here on SO and on other sites, but I found most of them to have thir own annoying usage issues. this has given rise to projects like the distributable .gitinclude.NET and the GH Pages hosted git-do-not-ignore, each of which simply help make this less tedious to manutain.

each of these (and many other blog posts) recommend starting out with a simply * to, quite literally, ignore all files and folders in the current root.

thereafter, including a file is "as simple" as prefixing the path with !, such as !.gitignore to ensure our repo doesn't ignore it's own .gitignore rules file.

the down side of this, is that when Git encounters an ignored folder, for performance reasons it does not check it's contents. trying to not ignore a file in a nested path gets very cumbersome:

# ...when ignoring all files and folders in the current root
*

!custom_path                       # allow Git to look inside this folder
custom_path/*                      # but ignore everything it contains
!custom_path/extras                # allow Git to look inside this folder
custom_path/extras/*               # but ignore everything it contains
!custom_path/extras/path_to_keep   # allow Git to see the file or folder you want to commit

so to offer an alternative idea, I've just configured a .gitignore file in the root of my Windows user profile folder, starting with **/* instead of the commonly seen * or *.*.

thereafter, each path that I want to explicitly include requires only one entry per tree level. slightly simplifying the previous example to the following:

# ...when ignoring all files recursively from the current root
**/*

!custom_path                       # allow Git to look inside this folder
!custom_path/extras                # allow Git to look inside this folder
!custom_path/extras/path_to_keep   # allow Git to see the file or folder you want to commit

this is not exactly a massive difference, but it is enough of a difference to make the file much easier to read and maintain, especially when trying to "un-ignore" a file nested about 5 levels deep...

Upvotes: 10

copeland3300
copeland3300

Reputation: 610

If you're only trying to include dot files, this worked for me...

!.*

Upvotes: 0

gzfrancisco
gzfrancisco

Reputation: 882

If you need to ignore files but not a specific file inside a directory, here is how I did it:

# Ignore everything under "directory"
directory/*
# But don't ignore "another_directory"
!directory/another_directory
# But ignore everything under "another_directory"
directory/another_directory/*
# But don't ignore "file_to_be_staged.txt"
!directory/another_directory/file_to_be_staged.txt

Upvotes: 19

Christian Severin
Christian Severin

Reputation: 1831

Late to the party, but my solution would be to have a directory for source files and a different directory for executables and program output, something like this: 

+ .git
|    (...)
+ bin
|    my_exe.exe
|    my_output.txt
+ src
     some_file.c
     some_file.h

... and then only add the stuff in src/ to my repository and ignore bin/ entirely.

Upvotes: 1

Smaranjit
Smaranjit

Reputation: 779

The best solution to achieve this

create .gitignore file in repository root, and if you want to include only .c file then you need to add below lines to .gitignore file

*.*
!*.c

this will include all .c file from directory and subdirectory recursively.

using 

*
!*.c

will not work on all version of git.

Tested on

git version 2.12.2.windows.2

Upvotes: 25

Vineel Kumar Reddy
Vineel Kumar Reddy

Reputation: 4716

create .gitignore file in your repository and you want to track only c files and ignore all other files then add the following lines to it....

*
!*.c

'*' will ignore all files

and ! will negate files be to ignored....so here we are asking git not to ignore c files....

Upvotes: 99

T.E.D.
T.E.D.

Reputation: 44804

I haven't had need to try this myself, but from my reading of TFM it looks like a negated pattern would do what you want. You can override entries in .gitignore with later negated entries. Thus you could do something like:

*.c
!frob_*.c
!custom.c

To have it ignore all .c files except custom.c and anything starting with "frob_"

Upvotes: 321

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