Not sure why but .gitignore isn't working

Question

I have added /build/ to my .gitingore but whenever I do build, git shows that my build folder is untracked. I have following folder hierarchy

~/workspace/ProjectName/ ➤ 617a838|mainline⚡
1361 ± : tree -La 1                                                                                                                                                                                                  [6d1h6m] ✭
.
├── .DS_Store
├── .git
├── .gitignore
├── Config
├── build
├── build.xml
├── checkstyle.xml
├── configuration
├── src
└── tst

5 directories, 5 files

~/workspace/ProjectName/ ➤ 617a838|mainline⚡
1362 ± : git status                                                                                                                                                                                                  [6d1h7m] ✭
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

        build

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Here is content of .gitignore

/build/
/eclipse-bin/

one thing that i did notice is that .gitingore is a hidden file. Does this even matter?

Maybe this answer will help https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11451535/gitignore-is-not-working — Sergei Kasatkin, Jun 07 '17 at 21:43
Your `git status` output indicates that `build` is a *file*, not a directory ("folder"). — torek, Jun 07 '17 at 22:06

Vampire · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-07T22:27:06.713

Your .gitignore is fine for exculding a folder named build directly besides the .gitignore file and all its contents.

That the file is hidden is by definition. All files on *nix systems that start with a dot are considered hidden files and this does not interrupt the least.

That your ignore is not working is simply due to the fact that build is not a folder, but a file. The git status output says this at least and that is why the ignore is not working. If build would be a folder with some trackable content inside, it would appear as build/ in git status output, not as build.

If build actually is a symbolic link to another folder, that would also explain the situation, because a symbolic link is file that links to a folder, but is not a folder by itself. In that case you would need to exclude the file build instead of the folder build, or to be correct both, the file and the folder called build, as you can fix the type to be a folder by appending a slash as last character, but you cannot fix the type to be a file. So if this is your situation, change /build/ to /build and the symbolic link will be ignored.

Not sure why but .gitignore isn't working

1 Answers1