Q: Ignore ./foo, but not script/foo

Hi!

I have a (simple) question I could not answer elegantly from the gitignore(5) manual page:

A project produces a "foo" binary in the root directory that I want to ignore (So I put "foo" into .gitignore) Unfortunately I found out taht I cannot have a "script/foo" added while "foo" is in .gitignore. So I changed "foo" to "./foo" in .gitignore. I can could add "script/foo", but now "foo" is not ignored any more!

Is there as solution other than:? -- foo !script/foo !bla/foo #etc. --

If "foo" is one exception to generally using foo elsewhere, it seems to be counterproductive to have to add exceptions for all the cases that are not exceptions, while "foo" is the only exception...

Did I miss something? If so, maybe add it to a future manual page.

Regards, Ulrich

On Thu, Jul 19 2018, Ulrich Windl wrote:

The solution is to just do:

    echo /foo >.gitignore

Then it'll ignore the top-level /foo, but nothing else. How did you come up with this "./" syntax? It's not understood by gitignore. From gitignore(5):

   A leading slash matches the beginning of the pathname. For example,
   "/*.c" matches "cat-file.c" but not "mozilla-sha1/sha1.c".

It is a Unix thing: "./" or just "." refers to the current directory.

When calling scripts or programs in the current directory from a Unix command line, it is required to refer to them as, say, "./foo" (not just "foo") -- unless "." is in your PATH.

Most people do put "." in their PATH for convenience but it is considered a little unsafe [1].

Personally, I am surprised that gitignore does not understand this notation. To me, OPs meaning was crystal clear: "./foo" should mean to only ignore the foo in the repository's root directory.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/156582/why-is-not-in-the-path-by-default

~ Tim

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 07:06:57PM +1000, Timothy Rice wrote:

[...]

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IMO this is a gross overstatement: personally, I know of no person using a Unix-like operation system who does this.

On Thu, Jul 19 2018, Timothy Rice wrote:

To clarify I was trying to fish for whether we'd accidentally documented "./" somewhere since OP was making references to the docs.

Nachricht <CA+xP2SZJ0VN0Y7SChAx1a8joVMKMU2R9d0je801i=9SuLicF3w@mail.gmail.com>:

Hi!

Thanks, you are perfectly right: It works, and actually, when read carefully enough, the last item in "PATTERN FORMAT" explains that.

Maybe the EXAMPLES could have an example for each item (5 cases) described ;-)

Regards, Ulrich