.gitignore - ignore any 'bin' directory

Question

Hi, 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 :)

Answer 1

The .gitignore of your dream seems to be:

bin/

on the top level.

Answer 2

bin/* seems to work for me but I might not have got all cases

Answer 3

Oh gawd, I hate to answer my own question whilst it's still so fresh, but it seems I've stumbled upon the answer anyway.

/*/**/bin/**/*

Nice and symmetrical. This looks like the only way to avoid other files and directories with 'bin' as part of their names also getting ignored.

Anybody have any idea why it didn't work without that first *? Does ** not do what it normally does (match any number of directories) if it's the first thing in the expression?

Answer 4

I've no idea where the impression that ** has any special meaning in a .gitignore pattern comes from. It's not mentioned in the gitignore man page or the fnmatch man page which the gitignore man page refers to.

The way to ignore all directories called bin anywhere below the current level in a directory tree is with a .gitignore file with the pattern:

bin/

This should be pretty clear from the gitignore man page. There's even an example of ignoring a directory called foo using an analogous pattern.

Answer 5

I didn't see it mentioned here, but this appears to be case sensitive. Once I changed to /Bin the files were ignored as expected.