Subject: Re: gitignore: negating path patterns

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 May 2008 09:52:19 +0200

Kevin Ballard venit, vidit, dixit 23.05.2008 02:23:
> On May 21, 2008, at 7:52 AM, Michael J Gruber wrote:
> 
>> Hi there
>>
>> It seems that negating path patterns in gitignore doesn't work, or I
>> don't understand it (or both). With the attached script, git status
>> (1.5.5.1) reports "dir/a" as new and "dir/b" as untracked. I would
>> rather expect it to report "dir/c" as untracked also.
>>
>> It seems that "!b" matches to include "dir/b" (reverting the exclusion
>> "*" as expected), whereas "!dir/" does not match to include "dir/c".
>>
>> What's going on here?
> 
> "dir/" will not match anything, because paths are compared without  
> trailing slashes. Try "!dir".
> 

I am sorry, but this is plain wrong, at least if "man gitignore" is 
right (see below). "!dir" would match files whose name (pathname without 
leading directory name) matches "dir" (i.e.: is dir) and exclude those 
from exclusion (include them).

Also, replacing "!dir/" by "!dir" in my test script does not change the 
result. In fact, for "!dir" the result is as expected and documented, 
just for "!dir/" I would expect something else.

So, thanks for trying to help, although reading the manual or testing 
your advice before would be appreciated even more. ;)

Michael

 From man gitignore:

If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose of the 
following description, but it would only find a match with a directory. 
In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and paths underneath it, 
but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link foo (this is 
consistent with the way how pathspec works in general in git).