From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:09:37 GMT Subject: Re: .gitignore issue Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <20260121210312.GA723458@coredump.intra.peff.net> Jeff King writes: > On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 06:51:02PM +0000, Pushkar Singh wrote: > >> This is expected behavior. >> When a directory matches an ignore rule, Git stops descending into it entirely. The pattern >> >> backup_STOCKS*/ >> >> matches directories starting with backup_STOCKS, and once Git prunes traversal at that level, similarly prefixed paths can disappear from git status, which is why backups/ no longer shows up. >> >> This isn’t a bug, but a result of how ignore patterns and directory pruning work. > > I found this explanation confusing: surely we would never match > "backups/" itself via a pattern like "backup_STOCKS*". And I'm not sure > what you mean by "similarly prefixed paths". Great minds think alike. I was writing almost identical response about backups/ being full of backups/backup_STOCKS_{1,2,3,4} and nothing unignored in there. > We can't know for certain this is what's going on because Alf didn't > show us what's in the backups/ directory, but one imagines it is also > full of backup_STOCKS_* directories. Thanks.