What pattern does .gitignore follow?

Question

Here is the content of my current directory.

$ ls
foo.foo
$ ls -a
.  ..  .bar.foo  .foo  foo.foo  .gitignore

Then I turn this directory int

Answer 1

gitignore use of '*' follows the glob convention:

Git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag: wildcards in the pattern will not match a / in the pathname.

For example, "Documentation/*.html" matches "Documentation/git.html" but not "Documentation/ppc/ppc.html" or "tools/perf/Documentation/perf.html".

The OP Lone Learner asks in the comments:

Does the shell also use fnmatch(3) to process glob patterns?
In that case why does * not match zero characters before. (i.e. hidden files) but gitignore does?

Because that is a shell configuration choice.

Type (using shopt, which is specific to bash):

shopt -s dotglob
echo *.foo
.foo foo.foo

That is using dotglob

If set, Bash includes filenames beginning with a '.' in the results of filename expansion. (for pattern matching)