How to exclude R.java from Git tracking (after the fact)?

Question

I thought that I was pretty familiar with how to use .gitignore (which still works great for me for excluding top level directories), but I now discovered that multiple R.java files from various libraries used in my application are being tracked and I would like to stop tracking them.

I tried adding the line R.java to the .gitignore in the top level directory, but git status keeps reporting them as modified.

I then tried adding the line */gen/ to the .gitignore in the top level directory, but git status still reports them as modified.

What is the trick to tell git to stop tracking them?

Answer 1

.gitignore should stop them from being indexed. Did you delete the unwanted files with git rm or rm?

Answer 2

You need to first remove them from the repo ( git rm or git rm --cached and commit) for the ignore to work as git does not ignore tracked / versioned files.