.gitignore does not understand my folder wildcard on windows

Question

I'm encountering a weird issue with .gitignore on Windows.

I want git to ignore all .exe files, except those in the Dependencies folder (and all subfolders).

So I have:

.gitignore:

*.exe
!/Dependencies/**/*.exe

This, unfortunately, does not work.

Meanwhile, this does:

*.exe
!/Dependencies/folder/subfolder/*.exe

So I'm wondering, am I messing something up, or is this some kind of bug?

I'm running msysgit on Windows (Windows 7 x64) version 1.6.5.1-preview20091022

Thanks in advance for any input :)

Answer 1

Since git 1.8.2 (March, 8th 2013), the ** is now supported:

The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory.

E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a subdirectory of "foo".

In your case, that means this line might now be supported:

!/Dependencies/**/*.exe

Answer 2

The .gitignore documentation says:

git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag

It's possible that fnmatch on your platform does not support ** in a path.

Answer 3

You could add a .gitignore file to the Dependencies folder with

*.exe

inside. The obvious downside is that ignore the specifications are scattered among several files now.