gitignore is not ignoring one specific folder

Question

Using msysgit on windows: git version 1.8.5.2.msysgit.0

I have a folder tree with hundreds of small projects like this:

Root
|--Project1
    |--xx/xx/xx/xx/obj
|--Project2
    |--yy/yy/yy/yy/obj
|--Project3
    |--zz/zz/zz/zz/obj

I have the entry obj/ in my .gitignore file

One single obj folder is not being ignored and always appears in the untracked files list. I have tried commands such as:

git rm -r --cached Project3\zz\zz\zz\zz\obj

but it just says pathspec did not match any files - of course it would as the files are not tracked in my git repository.. they're just in the local folder.

How can I ignore this folder?

Perhaps that one `obj` folder has at least one file under it that is currently being tracked... — twalberg, Mar 24 '14 at 16:05
-r doesn't make a difference and there are no tracked files under the obj folder — David J, Mar 24 '14 at 16:23

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '18 at 19:21

Try again with a recent (2018, 4 years later) version of Git.

If there is a file in that obj/, you can check if it is ignored or not with:

git check-ignore -v --  Project3\zz\zz\zz\zz\obj\aFile

Check also if one of the parent folder is not a gitlink (root entry for a nested Git repo, or a submodule)

git ls-tree HEAD Project3
git ls-tree HEAD Project3/zz
...
git ls-tree HEAD Project3/zz/zz/zz/zz/obj

If any of those commands yields 160000, that would mean an entry to be removed as I did here.

gitignore is not ignoring one specific folder

1 Answers1