Git add not working with .png files?

Question

I have a dirty working tree, dirty because I made changes to source files and touched up some images. I was trying to add just the images to the index, so I ran this command

Answer 1

Michael Mrozek's comment is essentially the answer. *.png matches files of that name in the current directory, not in subdirectories. If you want to add ones in a subdirectory, do so:

git add src/main/resources/icons/*.png

Or, depending on your shell, you may be able to do:

git add **/*.png

The point is that it's the shell that does the globbing (expands *.png into a list of filenames). Git has nothing to do with that; it just takes the arguments the shell gives it.

Edit: Since this managed to get accepted, I should go ahead and point out as others did that some git commands do support globbing internally (via fnmatch), so if you quote a glob pattern, it'll be passed unmodified by the shell to git, where the globbing expansion will take place.