How to I add something to the .gitignore so that the match is not recursive?

git ignore gitignore
pauldoo picture pauldoo · Mar 19, 2010 · Viewed 17.1k times · Source

How to I add something to the .gitignore so that the match is not recursive?

For example, I wish to ignore the directory foo and the file bar.txt in the current directory, but not any that exist in subdirectories.

I have tried this for my .gitignore file:

foo/
bar.txt

But unfortunately git applies this recursively, so that otherdir/bar.txt and otherdir/foo/ also get ignored, which is not what I want.

(Is there a command in git that shows me all ignored files, and reference the .gitignore file that is responsible for the file being ignored? This would be useful for debugging.)

Answer

pauldoo picture pauldoo · Mar 19, 2010

The solution is to place a leading slash on the .gitignore entries:

/foo/
/bar.txt

(I thought I tried this before posting on StackOverflow, but clearly I hadn't tried it properly, as this works perfectly.)

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