From: Dan Drake Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:20:42 GMT Subject: gitignore documentation for info/exclude files and patterns with relative directories Message-ID: Hello, In the "pattern format" section of the gitignore manpage, it says: > The slash "/" is used as the directory separator. Separators may occur at the > beginning, middle or end of the .gitignore search pattern. > > If there is a separator at the beginning or middle (or both) of the pattern, > then the pattern is relative to the directory level of the particular > .gitignore file itself. Otherwise the pattern may also match at any > level below the .gitignore level. For a .git/info/exclude file, the above makes it sound like the pattern will be relative to that .git/info directory, so that you would need to use this kind of p attern to match files starting with 'foo' in the root of the repo: ../../foo* However, it seems that for patterns in the info/exclude file, the beginning slash anchors the pattern to the root of the repo; the above pattern in that file should be '/foo*'. The documentation should mention this behavior for info/exclude, as well as the core.excludesFile. Dan -- Ceci n'est pas une .signature.