Is there a .gitnotice file?

Question

I have a directory where I want to keep track of only a few files out of many. The .gitignore file would become unnecessarily long compared to a .gitnotice. Is it possible to tell git to ignore everything except the designated files?

Answer 1

You can use the ! character to negate patterns in .gitignore. So, for example, you could ignore an entire directory other than a couple of specific files:

dir_to_ignore/*
!dir_to_ignore/file_you_want_to_track
!dir_to_ignore/another_file_you_want_to_track