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

Gist

# Ignore everything
*

# But not these files...
!script.pl
!template.latex

And probably include:

!.gitignore

Reference

From https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore:

An optional prefix "!" which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again. It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded. Git doesn’t list excluded directories for performance reasons, so any patterns on contained files have no effect, no matter where they are defined. Put a backslash ("\") in front of the first "!" for patterns that begin with a literal "!", for example, "\!important!.txt".

...

Example to exclude everything except a specific directory foo/bar (note the /* - without the slash, the wildcard would also exclude everything within foo/bar):

$ cat .gitignore
# exclude everything except directory foo/bar
/*
!/foo
/foo/*
!/foo/bar