How can git be configured to ignore files?

Question

There are some files we want ignored, not tracked, by git, and we are having trouble figuring out how to do that.

We have some third-party C library which is unpacked and we have it in Git. But when you configure && make it, it produces many new files. How to write .gitignore to track source files and not the new stuff. (it's not like forbidding *.o)

Edit: There are at least 12 file-types. So we would like NOT to enumerate, which type we want and which not.

Answer 1

Use ! to include all the types of files you need. Something like in the following example"

*
!*.c
!*.h