git ignore filenames which contain <pattern to ignore>

Question

I am trying to tell git to ignore files which have _autosave somewhere in the filename. An example of such a file is:

hats/TFCB_ATV_TOP_HAT/_autosave-TFCB_ATV_HAT.kicad_pcb

In a regular expression, I would simply use the pattern ^.*_autosave.*

Of course, git doesn't use regular expressions to evaluate its .gitignore file. I did some reading and had the impression that *_autosave* would work, but it doesn't.

What is the correct syntax to tell git to ignore these files?

Answer 1

Add this line to your .gitignore

*_autosave* 

According to git help gitignore

patterns match relative to the location of the .gitignore file

Patternz like *_autosave* match files or directories containing "_autosave" somewhere in the name.

Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns mathed against full pathname may have special meaning

A leading "**" followed by a slash means match in all directories.

But "**/" seams redundant in some enviroments.

EDIT:

My machine at work (using git 1.7.1) does not have support for dubbel asterisk, but with *_autosave* it excludes the files.

here is a simple test scrtipt (for Linux)

DIR="$(mktemp -d)" git init $DIR/project1 cd $DIR/project1 cat > .gitignore <<EOF **/*_autosave* *_autosave* EOF mkdir dir1 touch README foo_autosave dir1/bar_autosave git status  rm -rf $DIR/project1