Question

The project I’m working on uses autogen.sh and configure to set up compilation, and these generate files such as config.h and others. Now, when generated, I would assume that these files would be untracked and so git status should list these files. However, doing so after running these two scripts actually produces this output:

owner@ubuntu:~/project$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

The nothing to commit (working directory clean) implies that nothing has changed since the last commit. Furthermore, it does not tell me that Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by X commits., meaning that no new commits have been made (confirmed by git log).

If these files aren’t untracked and they have not been committed, how is git treating these files? I should mention that there are no .gitignore files anywhere.

Answer 1

git doesn’t have any special magic for handling those files, though perhaps your project does hidden away somewhere else. Check with git status --ignored to see if they are being ignored anyway.

If so, you should also check .git/info/exclude, and any global ignore configuration you have in git, to see if they are responsible for those files being ignored.