Question

I have configured numerous .gitignore files to filter out many different unwanted files from a set of about 6,000 untracked files. I want to do git add . when I’ve got my filtered list looking the way I want it.

But, then I want to disable the .gitignore filters temporarily to see what got left behind, and make sure there was nothing important accidentally filtered.

I know that git-clean includes an option to ignore .gitignore files. Is there a similar option for git-status?

I could go through and delete all the .gitignore files, do the check, then restore them, but it seems there should be an easier way?

Answer 1

Try using git ls-files --other – it should list all files that git doesn’t know about; i.e. those files that aren’t in the repository and aren’t ignored by .gitignore.

You can also use git ls-files --ignored --exclude-standard to see what files git is explicitly ignoring.