Following the .gitignore file in one of my research project built in python I have noticed the saved* command but I couldn't relate the purpose of it from that project directory.
Here're the commands in the .gitignore file:
*.pyc
.ipynb_checkpoints
saved*
Now, I could make out the first two commands but why is actually the saved* command used for in a certain .gitignore file?
Is it for blocking any newly created directories and treating them as unversioned files in the project folder ??
If you have any directories OR files that have names starting with 'saved' then they would be blocked from getting versioned/included in the git repo. The '*' is a wildcard, so it is looking for the string 'saved' with or without any characters in the name after that, and ignoring those files/paths from getting included when you run git commands.
There doesn't necessarily have to be a file or directory named that....but as wkl indicated in the comments, someone likely created a path like that to copy files to but didn't want them to get committed to the repository, so they added that to the .gitignore file.
See: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-started-with-git/ignoring-files for more info on how to use .gitignore.