How to ignore .gitignore files in git status?

Question

When I run git status, it lists a bunch of .gitignore files that I am not interested in seeing in the list (they got updated locally by Eclipse). I browsed numerous posts in regards to this seemingly common issue but none of the suggested solutions worked for me.

E.g. I went into ~/.gitconfig and found that

excludesfile = ~/.gitignore_global

Then I went into that file and added .gitignore at the tail but that did not change anything.

How do I effectively ignore .gitignore files in git status so they don't clutter the view?

Does `git status` show the `.gitignore` files being tracked? If so, then you can't ignore them. Maybe move Eclipse's extra settings into `.git/info/exclude` and drop the changes to the `.gitignore` files. — John Szakmeister, Sep 03 '13 at 23:31

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 04 '13 at 03:45

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It sounds like you might be misunderstanding what "ignore" means to Git. A file name mentioned in .gitignore means that if a file is untracked, then git status will not show that file as an untracked file.

Ignoring a file does not do anything when the file is tracked by Git, and has been modified. That is considered a change to your repository, which Git doesn't let you ignore. (After all, you have already told Git that file is important enough to store in your repository, so Git has an obligation to inform you about changes to that file.)

If your tools (Eclipse) is modifying your .gitignore files, I would suggest you instruct Eclipse to stop doing that.

answered Sep 04 '13 at 03:45

Greg Hewgill

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So then.. how to ignore .gitignore if it it were in the repo? This is a valid use case. – WestCoastProjects May 08 '15 at 14:59
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@javadba If you need to make local changes to `.gitignore` that you don't want to commit, then use `.git/info/exclude` instead. – Greg Hewgill May 08 '15 at 19:07
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@javadba Or use `git update-index --assume-unchanged myfile`. This is convenient when a file should be tracked but you never want to check in local changes to it. – Rad Haring Mar 03 '16 at 13:23
@RadHaring and Greg - thanks for the tips. These are useful wrt spark codebase. – WestCoastProjects Mar 03 '16 at 17:18

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 10 '15 at 21:58

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Try:

git status --ignored

From man git-status:

--ignored Show ignored files as well.

answered Feb 10 '15 at 21:58

user4552416

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This seems to be an answer to the opposite of the problem the user is experiencing. `git status` is *showing* ignored files. He **doesn't** want to see them. – Matt Feb 10 '15 at 22:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 04 '17 at 19:18

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Simply add the entry '.gitignore' to the .gitignore file.Then 'git status' won't show .gitignore as one of the untracked files. This might be helpful if you don't want to include .gitignore in the source control.

answered Jun 04 '17 at 19:18

shankar

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 03 '13 at 22:26

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You can,

Git ignore is internally used to set the ignores.

you can t ignore the ignore setting files, this woule be a strange behaviour

answered Sep 03 '13 at 22:26

dzada

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 07 '14 at 15:40

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See if your version of git supports the untracked option. For example:

git status --untracked-files=no

answered Sep 07 '14 at 15:40

Josef.B

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How to ignore .gitignore files in git status?

5 Answers5