I want to exclude everything in a folder named foo, except for stuff inside a folder named bar.
foo can appear anywhere in the directory structure more than once.
bar can appear anywhere in the directory structure under foo.
I tried
/**/foo/**
!/**/foo/**/bar/**
but it didn't work. It still ignores all the foo. It refuses to allow bar.
How do I solve this?
When you ignore a directory, you tell git to not even look there.
**/foo/**
ignores everything in foo/, including all the directories. git will never even see a bar directory nested farther down because the above told it to not examine anything in foo
**/foo/**
!**/foo/**/
!**/foo/**/bar/**
will do it, because you overrode the ~don't look~ instruction with ~but do look in all the directories~.
When this alternative makes sense to you, you understand everything:
**/foo/**
!**/foo/**/bar/**
!*/
From the gitignore documentation:
[A line starting with] An optional prefix "!" which negates the pattern; any matching file excluded by a previous pattern will become included again. It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded.
It seems like this isn't possible.
