If I put a pattern in a .gitignore
file with a leading slash, does the slash refer to the directory in which the .gitignore
file is located, or does it refer to the root of the whole repository?
(The man pages I have found have hidden this information carefully.)
Double Asterisk ** can be used to match any number of directories. **/logs matches all files or directories named logs (same as the pattern logs ) **/logs/*.log matches all files ending with .log in a logs directory. logs/**/*.log matches all files ending with .log in the logs directory and any of its subdirectories.
logs/important.log. Prepending an exclamation mark to a pattern negates it. If a file matches a pattern, but also matches a negating pattern defined later in the file, it will not be ignored.
gitignore should list the names or name-patterns of files that will be found in work-trees when working with your project, but that should not be committed to the project. In other words, it's not OS-specific, it's project-specific.
This is the documentation text:
- A leading slash matches the beginning of the pathname. For example, "/*.c" matches "cat-file.c" but not "mozilla-sha1/sha1.c".
These are my guesses:
If you use an in-repository-.gitignore
, the directory in which the .gitignore
is located - it is not really useful to make it relative to the repository root.
A short experiment with same-named files in the repository root and a subdirectory (and a .gitignore
in this same directory) confirms this.
If you use an .git/info/exclude
or core.excludesfile
, I suppose it is relative to the repository root.
Also this is (for info/exclude) confirmed by the same test (both tests on 1.7.3.4).
Schnouki found the right part of the documentation about this (emphasis mine):
- [...]
- Patterns read from a
.gitignore
file in the same directory as the path, or in any parent directory, with patterns in the higher level files (up to the toplevel of the work tree) being overridden by those in lower level files down to the directory containing the file. These patterns match relative to the location of the.gitignore
file. A project normally includes such.gitignore
files in its repository, containing patterns for files generated as part of the project build.- [...]
One could say that this fact could have been repeated again at the later part quoted above, for clarity.
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With