Why am I committing a bunch of desktop.ini files despite .gitignore?

Question

I don't understand what happened. I did

git add .
git commit

and suddenly I see a list of a bunch of desktop.ini files committed.

(I don't understand why previous commits did not get any of them, and what might have suddenly changed, but that's an aside)

So, I undid the commit

git reset --soft HEAD~1

Added a line to .gitignore:

./**/desktop.ini

And did another

git add .
git commit -m "test"

Still adding a bunch of desktop.ini. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Just write this simpler thing into your .gitignore:

desktop.ini

You could also do

**/desktop.ini

but it has the same effect. See man gitignore for details.

Then do something like this to get files out of the index:

git reset --soft
git add .

Answer 2

Your git reset --soft did not reset the index: you canceled the commit, but the files are still in the index (i.e. "added"). So, when you committed again, you got the same commit with the same files.

You wanted to to git reset --mixed (or omit --mixed which is the default anyway) to reset the index (but not the working tree).