Make .gitignore ignore everything except a few files

Question

I understand that a .gitignore file cloaks specified files from Git\'s version control. I have a project (LaTeX) that generates lots of extra files (.auth, .dvi, .pdf, logs,

Answer 1

You want to use /* instead of * or */ in most cases

Using * is valid, but it works recursively. It won't look into directories from then on out. People recommend using !*/ to whitelist directories again, but it's actually better to blacklist the highest level folder with /*

# Blacklist files/folders in same directory as the .gitignore file
/*

# Whitelist some files
!.gitignore
!README.md

# Ignore all files named .DS_Store or ending with .log
**/.DS_Store
**.log

# Whitelist folder/a/b1/ and folder/a/b2/
# trailing "/" is optional for folders, may match file though.
# "/" is NOT optional when followed by a *
!folder/
folder/*
!folder/a/
folder/a/*
!folder/a/b1/
!folder/a/b2/
!folder/a/file.txt

# Adding to the above, this also works...
!/folder/a/deeply
/folder/a/deeply/*
!/folder/a/deeply/nested
/folder/a/deeply/nested/*
!/folder/a/deeply/nested/subfolder

The above code would ignore all files except for .gitignore, README.md, folder/a/file.txt, folder/a/b1/ and folder/a/b2/ and everything contained in those last two folders. (And .DS_Store and *.log files would be ignored in those folders.)

Obviously I could do e.g. !/folder or !/.gitignore too.

More info: http://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore