What does *~ do in a .gitignore file?

git, gitignore

Solution

It ignores all files whose name ends in `~`, which is a usual suffix for text editors backup files.

`*` is a special symbol and means "any sequence of zero or more characters", while `~` is just an ordinary character. Putting the two parts together: "zero or more characters followed by a ~".

Problem

I just ran across a gitignore file that ends with the line *~ but I have not been able to find a description of what this does.

Original source