Git ignoring podfile when gitignore doesn't mention it

Question

My gitignore file says nothing about podfiles. In fact, I can make it empty, and still get the same result - my 'Podfile' is being ignored. If i change it's name to something different, it sees it, but otherwise just ignores it. I'm not sure why.

Answer 1

There's a nifty little utility called check-ignore* that serves exactly this purpose. Example use:

git check-ignore -vn path/to/Podfile

It'll output the file, line number and pattern that makes git exclude the file.

_{* fun trivia: check-ignore was born right here at Stack Overflow. So go forth and thank Adam Spiers! (-:}