CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgitignore
Chris Perkins
Chris Perkins

Reputation: 3490

How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?

I am attempting to use a .gitignore file with negated patterns (lines starting with !), but it's not working the way I expect.

As a minimal example, I have the folllowing directory structure:

C:/gittest
 -- .gitignore
 -- aaa/
   -- bbb/
     -- file.txt
   -- ccc/
     -- otherfile.txt

and in my gitignore file, I have this:

aaa/
!aaa/ccc/

My understanding (based on this doc page) is that the file aaa/ccc/otherfile.txt should not be ignored, but in fact git is ignoring everything under aaa.

Am I misunderstanding this sentence: "An optional prefix ! which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again."?

BTW, this is on Windows with msysgit 1.7.0.2.

Upvotes: 144

Views: 54003

Answers (3)

alexkb
alexkb

Reputation: 3356

If anyone's still not seeing newly un-ignored items in a git status running a git update-index before hand can help git to see the changes (at least in version 1.9.x of gitbash).

Upvotes: 6

xmak
xmak

Reputation: 1197

If you want to exclude everything in aaa, but include aaa/ccc and everything beneath it, you should use:

aaa/*
!aaa/ccc
!aaa/ccc/*

The first line tells git to ignore everthing beneath aaa, the second tells it not to ignore the folder aaa/ccc which actually "enables" the third line which then tells it not to ignore everything beneath aaa/ccc.

Upvotes: 33

Cascabel
Cascabel

Reputation: 497272

I think that what you actually want to do is:

aaa/*
!aaa/ccc

You're telling it "don't look in aaa" so it never even examines the path aaa/ccc. If you use the wildcard, it still reads the contents of aaa, then each entry matches the wildcard and is ignored, except aaa/ccc which gets put back in.

Upvotes: 237

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