How to git ignore subfolders / subdirectories?

Question

I have a lot of projects in my .Net solution. I would like to exclude all \"bin/Debug\" and \"bin/Release\" folders (and their contents), but still include the \"bin\" folde

Answer 1

The question isn't asking about ignoring all subdirectories, but I couldn't find the answer anywhere, so I'll post it: */*.

Answer 2

The generic way to ignore all subfolders, while continuing to track the files that are in the /bin directory would be to add the following line to your project's .gitignore file:

bin/*/*

If you want to ignore only particular named subfolders, you can do:

bin/Debug/*
bin/Release/*

nb. if the bin directory is not in the root of your project (alongside the .gitignore file), then instead of eg. bin/*/* you might need path/to/bin/*/*

Answer 3

Have you tried wildcards?

Solution/*/bin/Debug
Solution/*/bin/Release

With version 1.8.2 of git, you can also use the ** wildcard to match any level of subdirectories:

**/bin/Debug/
**/bin/Release/

Answer 4

To exclude content and subdirectories:

**/bin/*

To just exclude all subdirectories but take the content, add "/":

**/bin/*/

Answer 5

To ignore all subdirectories you can simply use:

**/

This works as of version 1.8.2 of git.

Answer 6

The only way I got this to work on my machine was to do it this way:

# Ignore all directories, and all sub-directories, and it's contents:
*/*

#Now ignore all files in the current directory 
#(This fails to ignore files without a ".", for example 
#'file.txt' works, but 
#'file' doesn't):
/*.*

#Only Include these specific directories and subdirectories:
!wordpress/
!wordpress/*/
!wordpress/*/wp-content/
!wordpress/*/wp-content/themes/

Notice how you have to explicitly allow content for each level you want to include. So if I have subdirectories 5 deep under themes, I still need to spell that out.

This is from @Yarin's comment here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5250314/1696153

These were useful topics:

• How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?
• How do gitignore exclusion rules actually work?

I also tried

*
*/*
**/**

and **/wp-content/themes/**

or /wp-content/themes/**/*

None of that worked for me, either. Lots of trail and error!