How to gitignore *only* files?

Question

I'm surprised that simple patterns like *.user in a .gitignore file seem to match files and folder names.

ringods$ mkdir TestIgnore ringods$ cd TestIgnore/ ringods$ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/ringods/Projects/hostbasket/TestIgnore/.git/ ringods$ git status # On branch master # # Initial commit # nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track) ringods$ mkdir security.user ringods$ touch security.user/file_may_not_be_ignored.txt ringods$ git status # On branch master # # Initial commit # # Untracked files: #   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # #   security.user/ nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track) ringods$ echo "*.user"> .gitignore ringods$ cat .gitignore  *.user ringods$ git status # On branch master # # Initial commit # # Untracked files: #   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # #   .gitignore nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track) 

Do I have the wrong expectation? How can I write a simple ignore files with extension blah and prevent folders ending in .blah being matched?

The gitignore man page mentions that patterns without a / are matched using shell glob pattern functionality, but it doesn't really tell me if it matches files only or files and directories.

Answer 1

.gitignore patterns just match directory entries or paths. There's no specific way to say "only match a regular file", however if you supply a trailing / then the pattern will only match a directory. You can use this to match non-directories (which is almost what you want) with two patterns:

*.user     # ignore all paths ending in '.user' !*.user/   # but don't ignore these paths if they are directories.