Using two asterisks to add a file in git

Question

I want to add a file which has a unique file name but a long preceding path (e.g. a/b/c/d/filename.java). Normally I would add this to my repository by doing

git add *filename.java.

However I have also done this before:

git add a/b/c/d/filename*

So I tried to combine the two:

git add *filename*

but this does something weird. It adds every untracked file. I can see possible reasons for failure but they all should occur in one of the previous two commands so I don't know why this is happening.

My question isn't so much about how to add a file to a git repository with just its file name (although that would be useful). My question is what is my misunderstanding of the * operation which makes me think the above should work.

Info:

I am using Git Bash for Windows, which is based on minGW.

Answer 1

You're looking at globs (not regular expressions, which are a different pattern-matching language), and they're expanded by your shell, not by git.

If you want to see how they're going to match, just pass the same glob to another command, eg.

$ ls -d *filename.java

vs

$ ls -d *filename*

(I've just added the -d so ls doesn't show the contents of any directories that match)

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Since you're using git bash, and it's possible that glob expansion behaves differently from a regular shell, try

$ git add --dry-run --verbose -- *filename*

for example: this should show you how it really expands the glob and what effect that has.

Note the -- ... if you're using globs that might match a filename with a leading -, it's important to make sure git knows it's a filename and not an option.

Unfortunately, this will only show you the files which both match the glob, and have some difference between the index and working copy.

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Answer from author: The dry run helped a lot, here is what I found:

I was forgetting about the bin folder which I haven't added, so when I performed the dry run I realised it was finding two matches: filename.java and filename.class. When I changed the glob to *filename.j* it worked.

My next step was to remove the .class and try the command again: it worked! It is still unexplained why git bash added everything when it found two matches... since the dry run behaves differently from the actual run I think there must be a bug, but I think that discussion is to be held elsewhere (unless somebody thinks it isn't a bug).