Is there a way to tell git to only include certain files instead of ignoring certain files?

Question

My programs generally generate huge output files (~1 GB) which I do not want to be backing up to the git repository. So instead of being able to do

git add .

I have to do something like

git add *.c *.cc *.f *.F *.C *.h *.cu

which is a little bit cumbersome...

I feel fairly confident I could write a quicky perl script ls the directory contents into .gitignore and then remove files based on a .gitinclude (or some similar name) file, but that seems a little too hackish. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I haven't had need to try this myself, but from my reading of TFM it looks like a negated pattern would do what you want. You can override entries in .gitignore with later negated entries. Thus you could do something like:

*.c
!frob_*.c
!custom.c

To have it ignore all .c files except custom.c and anything starting with "frob_"