Telling git to ignore symlinks

Question

This question has appeared in similar forms here and here, but they don\'t seem to match up with what I\'m looking for.

I\'m making a project in StaticMatic, a Ruby

Answer 1

I don't keep the executables, and symlinks in my repository... so I want to omit them as well when I do a "git status".

If, like me, you want to ignore symlinks, directories and executables (ala some of the files in $NAG_HOME/libexec you can add those files into .gitignore as follows:

   file * | egrep 'ELF|symbolic|directory' | awk -F\: '{ print $1 }' >> .gitignore

   echo ".gitignore" >> .gitignore

Then, when you do a git status, it won't spit back the list of those files if you have not added them to your repository.

Answer 2

If you really want to ignore a filename if it's a symlink or file but not if it is a directory, you can add to .gitignore :

/media
!/media/

To formulate it like @Chris_Rasys, this will :

• Ignore - (symlink) ./media
• Ignore - (file) ./media
• Do not ignore - (directory) ./media
• Do not ignore - ./something/media
• Do not ignore - ./media.bak
• Do not ignore - ./media-somethingelse