.gitignore everything but .c and .h recursively

Question

I would like to ignore everything in a certain folder and its subfolders, except for .c and .h files.

Yet locally, i need other files too. Do i

Answer 1

Ignoring * means ignore everything including top-level directories. After that git doesn't even look into subdirectories. To fix that unignore directories. Your entire .gitignore should look like this:

# Ignore all
*

# Unignore directories
!*/

# Unignore source code files
!source/**/*.c
!source/**/*.h

Another approach is to ignore everything but force-add necessary files with git add -f.