How do I stop git enumerating my working directory

Hi,

I'm a recent convert to git. I've been swapping over my projects from cvs to git. The latest candidate for conversion is the config files for my Linux server. I've been using cvs to record all the config changes, and - mostly-automatically - to setup new servers. Git will do a far better job, I think, but I think I'm going to run into a problem: the root directory of the server will be the working directory. Only relatively few files will be under version control. How do I stop git enumerating the whole drive whenever I do things like git-diff?

I don't think I can make .gitignore files do the job, because it seems that you can set up to ignore a whole directory, and then partially countermand that by placing a .gitignore file (containing ! commands) inside the directory. That makes me think that ignoring doesn't prevent the enumeration.

Any help most appreciated. I really want to use git for this.

Cheers,
	Paul.