List files ignored by git exclusively by the rules in .git/info/exclude

Question

My repo has a big .gitignore. I also have some rules in my .git/info/exclude because I do not want my workflow to affect the repo: I use certain tools, and certain processes which generate files, that I do not want to neither be commited to the repo, nor be listed in the .gitignore. Those are my "private ignored files".

In a recent project, I have experienced a funny situation: running some tests with some excluded files present break the tests in strange ways. Therefore, before I run the tests (which take hours to run), I need to make sure that I got rid of annoying private files.

Listing all excluded files is not an option:

git ls-files --other

This produces a list too big for being of any use.

And this:

git ls-files --other --exclude-standard

Does not list files excluded via the rules of .git/info/exclude (or via .gitignore)

This does the opposite of what I want:

git ls-files -o -X .git/info/exclude

Lists all ignore files except those in .git/info/exclude

This goes in the right direction:

git ls-files -o -X .gitignore

But then I need to find all .gitignore in all folders manually (the repo is very large and has lots of .gitignore)

This is nice:

git check-ignore -v *

But is not recursive, and there is no recurse option.

I assume I could diff these two:

git ls-files -o
git ls-files -o -X .git/info/exclude

But really!? is there no better way to list the files excluded by one particular rule file?

EDIT

This is the closer I get:

find . -type f | git check-ignore -v --stdin | grep '\.git/info/exclude'

It only lists files (which I think is what git tracks anyway), and it is slow. I would expect an internal git command to be faster.

Answer 1

The command you're looking for is:

git ls-files --ignored --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude

In other words, you forgot to include the --ignored option to show just the ignored files.

The --ignored option is used in conjunction with either --cached, to show the ignored files already in the index, or --others, to show the ignored untracked files.

Answer 2

Besides Enrico Compidoglio's answer—which is probably the best way to do this in an automated fashion—you could also temporarily hide (i.e., rename) the .git/info/exclude file and use git ls-files --other --exclude-standard, then un-hide your personal exclusion file. The drawback to trying to automate this is that if two entities attempt it "at the same time", or while other Git operations are running, the lack of atomicity shows. That is, there are three steps involved and the Git repository is therefore in "before", "during", and "after" states and should not be used by anything in the "during" state.