How to ignore everything in a directory except one file

Question

Repo structure:

.gitignore
file1
file2
dir/
    file3
    <stuff>

I want to ignore everything inside dir except file 3. Here's what I have in my .gitignore file:

dir/*
!dir/file3

But this doesn't seem to work. git still tries to index everything in dir. How do I fix this?

UPDATE - Fixed after deleting the old .gitignore file, and making a new one. The new one was not made using > .gitignore.

Answer 1

The right way to do it is:

!dir
dir/*
!dir/file3

Note that there are other solutions, such as creating a local .gitignore file in dir/, which will take precedence over the previous one.

Curiously, I also tried your solution, and

dir/*
!dir/file3

Seems to work for me. If someone could comment on this, it would be appreciated.

Answer 2

this worked for me:

!/dir/
/dir/*
!/dir/file3