Keep ignored files out of git status

git gitignore
knuton picture knuton · Nov 30, 2009 · Viewed 73.7k times · Source

I would like to stop Git from showing ignored files in git status, because having tons of documentation and config files in the list of Changed but not updated files, renders the list half-useless.

Is it normal for Git to show these files?

I put the ignore information in a .gitignore file in the root directory of the Git repository and they are not added when using git add . but it seems that they are not fully ignored either, as they show up in the aforementioned list and do not show up in the list printed by git ls-files --others -i --exclude-standard. Only files matched by the patterns in ~/.gitignore show up there.

Could it be because at an earlier stage I didn't ignore them and they were thus committed at least once?

Answer

MBO picture MBO · Nov 30, 2009

As I found in this post, .gitignore only works for untracked files. If you added files to repository, you can:

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

or remove them from repository by

git rm --cached <file>

Edit

This article explains that too

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