Question

How can I ignore .pyc files in git?

If I put it in .gitignore it doesn’t work. I need them to be untracked and not checked for commits.

Answer 1

Put it in .gitignore. But from the gitignore(5) man page:

  ·   If the pattern does not contain a slash /, git treats it as a shell
       glob pattern and checks for a match against the pathname relative
       to the location of the .gitignore file (relative to the toplevel of
       the work tree if not from a .gitignore file).

  ·   Otherwise, git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for
       consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag: wildcards in
       the pattern will not match a / in the pathname. For example,
       "Documentation/*.html" matches "Documentation/git.html" but not
       "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html" or
       "tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html".

So, either specify the full path to the appropriate *.pyc entry, or put it in a .gitignore file in any of the directories leading from the repository root (inclusive).