ignoring any 'bin' directory on a git project

user_40834 0
Viewed 1008397

I have a directory structure like this:

.git/
.gitignore
main/
  ...
tools/
  ...
...

Inside main and tools, and any other directory, at any level, there can be a 'bin' directory, which I want to ignore (and I want to ignore everything under it too). I've tried each of these patterns in .gitignore but none of them work:

/**/bin/**/*
/./**/bin/**/*
./**/bin/**/*
**/bin/**/*
*/bin/**/*
bin/**/*
/**/bin/* #and the others with just * at the end too

Can anyone help me out? The first pattern (the one I think should be working) works just fine if I do this:

/main/**/bin/**/*

But I don't want to have an entry for every top-level directory and I don't want to have to modify .gitignore every time I add a new one.

This is on Windows using the latest msysgit.

EDIT: one more thing, there are files and directories that have the substring 'bin' in their names, I don't want those to be ignored :)

gitignore git
16 Answers

Step 1: Add following content to the file .gitignore.

# User-specific files
*.suo
*.user
*.userosscache
*.sln.docstates

# Build results
[Dd]ebug/
[Dd]ebugPublic/
[Rr]elease/
[Rr]eleases/
x64/
x86/
bld/
[Bb]in/
[Oo]bj/

# Visual Studio 2015 cache/options directory
.vs/

Step 2: Make sure take effect

If the issue still exists, that's because settings in .gitignore can only ignore files that were originally not tracked. If some files have already been included in the version control system, then modifying .gitignore is invalid. To solve this issue completely, you need to open Git Bash or Package Manager Console (see screenshot below) to run following commands in the repository root folder.

git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -m "Update .gitignore"

PM console Then the issue will be completely solved.

user_60753310

Literally none of the answers actually worked for me; the only one that worked for me was (on Linux):

**/bin
(yes without the / in the end)

git version 2.18.0
user_37312500

In addition to @CB Bailey's answer:

I tried to remove multiple folders (in subfolders) named et-cache (caching folder from Wordpress divi theme) from the index and from being tracked.

I added

et-cache/

to the .gitignore file. But

git rm -r --cached et-cache

resulted in an error:

fatal: pathspec 'et-cache' did not match any files

So the solution was to use powershell:

Get-ChildItem et-cache -Recurse |% {git rm -r --cached $_.FullName}

This searches for all subfolders named et-cache. Each of the folders path (fullname) is then used to remove it from tracking in git.

user_45503930

If the pattern inside .gitignore ends with a slash /, it will only find a match with a directory.

In other words, bin/ will match a directory bin and paths underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link bin.

If the pattern does not contain a slash, like in bin Git treats it as a shell glob pattern (greedy). So best would be to use simple /bin.

bin would not be the best solution for this particular problem.

user_58849550

In my case encoding of gitignore file was problematic, check if it is UTF-8

user_40666290
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