I am reading the official GIT manual. However, I am finding that some things are not being ignored in my .gitignore file. For instance:
The GIT manual says, "You can end patterns with a forward slash (/) to specify a directory." You can start patterns with a forward slash (/) to avoid recursively
As it stands, I have a directory in the same directory where the .gitignore file is located. I also have a directory entitled 'test'. Test has several sub-dirs and the last directory has a text file. The full path is test/matt/end/matt.txt
I only have one command in the .gitignore file. For testing I am substituting to versions of it:
When I use the following:
/test - It ignores the entire path including the matt.txt file. When I try: test/ - It does the same exact thing.
The GIT manual also says the following, "only ignore the TODO file in the current directory, not subdir /TODO: /TODO"
Can someone please explain this to me please? Could the manual be wrong?
I created a new git repository on Linux. You will see everything in the screen shot.
In the .gitignore file I have tried it both ways /matt and matt/ Take a look at the screen shot here .gitignore. Based on the GIT manual, it shouldn't be working this way.
You're confused about what recursive means here. In this context, if you write
/test
It will not ignore any subdirectories named test. If you instead write
test/
all subfolders named test will be ignored as well.
I created a repository with the following files:
new file: .gitattributes
new file: .gitignore
new file: aFolder/test/New Text Document.txt
new file: test/New Text Document.txt
If add /test to my .gitignore file:
new file: .gitattributes
new file: .gitignore
new file: aFolder/test/New Text Document.txt
Notice git doesn't recurse for the test directory. It only ignored top-level directories named test. If instead I add test/:
new file: .gitattributes
new file: .gitignore
Now, it ignores any file that is contained within a test directory, regardless of the depth of that directory.