Question

I’ve been using git but still having confusion about the .gitignore file paths.

So, what is the difference between the following two paths in .gitignore file?

 tmp/* public/documents/**/* 

I can understand that tmp/* will ignore all the files and folders inside it. Am I right? But what does that second line path mean?

Answer 1

This depends on the behavior of your shell. Git doesn’t do any work to determine how to expand these. In general, * matches any single file or folder:

/a/*/z  matches        /a/b/z  matches        /a/c/z  doesn't match  /a/b/c/z 

** matches any string of folders:

/a/**/z  matches        /a/b/z  matches        /a/b/c/z  matches        /a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/z  doesn't match  /a/b/c/z/d.pr0n 

Combine ** with * to match files in an entire folder tree:

/a/**/z/*.pr0n  matches        /a/b/c/z/d.pr0n  matches        /a/b/z/foo.pr0n  doesn't match  /a/b/z/bar.txt