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.

Accepted Answer

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.

How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?

Solution

Problem