Question

I have two files I wish to ignore:

• .idea/workspace.xml
• someapp/src/.idea/workspace.xml

I thought adding this single rule to .gitignore will suffice:

.idea/workspace.xml

But it only catches the top-level .idea/workspace.xml (git status shows someapp/src/.idea/workspace.xml as untracked).

I also tried **/.idea/workspace.xml, but this doesn’t work at all. Help?

Answer 1

• […]
• 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. […]

As soon as the path contains a slash, Git will no longer check for a match in the path but instead will use the glob behaviour directly. As such, you cannot match for .idea/workspace.xml but only for workspace.xml.

Git manual: gitignore.