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gitgitignoreglob

Why does glob pattern with double asterisk not match anything in subdirectories?

I'm trying to write a .gitignore rule to exclude some files in a particular directory that has multiple levels of subdirectories.

The folder structure looks something like this:

out
├─a
│ ├─source
│ │ ├─.keepme
│ │ ├─183597.txt
│ │ ├─271129.txt
│ │ └─288833.txt
│ └─parsed
│   ├─.keepme
│   ├─183597.csv
│   ├─271129.csv
│   └─288833.csv
├─b
│ └─(...)

(etc.)

I would like to keep the .keepme files (so that Git saves the directory structure), so I figure I'll write a rule to match anything under out that matches the pattern ?*.*:

out/**/?*.*

However, this does not match any files.

I thought that ** will match any number of subdirectories; why is this not working?

I'm running Git 1.8 in Bash 4.2 on a Fedora 18 VM.

Solution

  • First, make sure you are using Git 1.8.2 or up, since that's when ** support was introduced.

    It sounds like you're trying to exclude .keepme files by matching *.*. However, since * matches zero or more characters, it matches the empty string in front of the period in .keepme, including this file as well.

    Maybe you intended it to work like out/**/?*.*

    If you'd like to match all non-dotfiles, you can use out/**/[!.]* which will also include filenames without periods in them, like Makefile.