CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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guitarfreak
guitarfreak

Reputation: 89

GIT - fatal: cannot use .idea/ as an exclude file

I worked on a project and after running git add I noticed a directory which was not intended to be in there. The directory to be removed is .idea/. After running

git config core.excludesfile .idea/

I got a message

fatal: cannot use .idea/ as an exclude file

And now my console has frozen, any git related command except dit diff throws the same error. How could I get my rep functioning normally? Thank you in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4807

Answers (2)

Sahil Ralkar
Sahil Ralkar

Reputation: 2404

following solution helped me 

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

Upvotes: 4

Mad Physicist
Mad Physicist

Reputation: 114578

You need to add your directory to the file named by core.excludesfile, which normally defaults to .gitignore. The reason git freezes is that the ignore file gets checked by almost every command, but you have a folder instead of a file specified.

To fix your immediate problem, open .git/config in a text editor. You should see a section that has the following:

[core]
    ...
    excludesfile = .idea/

(... represents a bunch of other lines that you don't care about). Remove the line with excludesfile. That will restore your repo to using .gitignore as the list of excluded files.

To properly ignore your .idea/ directory, open a file called .gitignore in your root project directory (make a new one if you have to). Add the following line to it:

.idea/

This will tell git to ignore any folders named .idea anywhere in your project. If you only want to ignore it in the root directory, add the following instead:

/.idea/

Since it appears from the question that you already added the file, you will have to remove it from the index as well as from your repo. Make sure to run the following:

git rm --cached .idea

Thanks to @TimBiegeleisen's comment for the last part.

Upvotes: 4

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