Is there negation syntax for git add's filepattern?

Question

Suppose I want to use git add (or some other command line directive - I cannot use .gitignore) to add all files EXCEPT for a *.hi file. Is there a way to do this? So far I have tried:

git add '!*.hi'

git add '!(*.hi)'

As I understand it, this is how you specify a negation in glob syntax, and it's also how you do it in .gitignore. Yet for both these commands, I receive the error fatal: [pattern] did not match any files. For what it's worth, I'm running these commands from Windows Powershell.

Answer 1

A pure Git way would be to add them all and then remove those files you don’t want from the index again:

git add .
git rm --cached *.hi

The --cached is required to remove them only from the index; otherwise you would delete those files. Note that git rm will always “add a removal” to the index, so this is probably not what you want in case the files are tracked. Then you should use git reset as Klas Mellbourn suggested in the comments:

git add .
git reset -- *.hi

Answer 2

In PowerShell, this works:

git add $(Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Exclude '*.hi')