How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?

Question

I am attempting to use a .gitignore file with negated patterns (lines starting with !), but it's not working the way I expect.

As a minimal example, I have the folllowing directory structure:

C:/gittest  -- .gitignore  -- aaa/    -- bbb/      -- file.txt    -- ccc/      -- otherfile.txt 

and in my gitignore file, I have this:

aaa/ !aaa/ccc/ 

My understanding (based on this doc page) is that the file aaa/ccc/otherfile.txt should not be ignored, but in fact git is ignoring everything under aaa.

Am I misunderstanding this sentence: "An optional prefix ! which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again."?

BTW, this is on Windows with msysgit 1.7.0.2.

Answer 1

I think that what you actually want to do is:

aaa/* !aaa/ccc 

You're telling it "don't look in aaa" so it never even examines the path aaa/ccc. If you use the wildcard, it still reads the contents of aaa, then each entry matches the wildcard and is ignored, except aaa/ccc which gets put back in.

Answer 2

If you want to exclude everything in aaa, but include aaa/ccc and everything beneath it, you should use:

aaa/* !aaa/ccc !aaa/ccc/* 

The first line tells git to ignore everthing beneath aaa, the second tells it not to ignore the folder aaa/ccc which actually "enables" the third line which then tells it not to ignore everything beneath aaa/ccc.