gitignore - now to ignore files but keep child directories

Question

I want to ignore all files in a directory but not any children directories and their contents. For instance ...

parentdir
   childdir
      filea
      fileb
   file1
   file2
   file3

So, I want to ignore file1, file1, file3 but keep everything else. How do I do that?

Answer 1

You can use a leading ! to negate a pattern, reincluding any names excluded by previous patterns. This should work:

parentdir/*
!parentdir/*/

This says to exclude everything inside parentdir (but not parentdir itself), but then don't exclude any directories -- a trailing slash will match directories but not files.