ignoring any 'bin' directory on a git project

Question

I have a directory structure like this:

.git/
.gitignore
main/
  ...
tools/
  ...
...

Inside main and tools, and any other directory, at an

Answer 1

If the pattern inside .gitignore ends with a slash /, it will only find a match with a directory.

In other words, bin/ will match a directory bin and paths underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link bin.

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If the pattern does not contain a slash, like in bin Git treats it as a shell glob pattern (greedy). So best would be to use simple /bin.

bin would not be the best solution for this particular problem.