I am not saying that the ignore lists don't work. They certainly work very well. I am just looking for a behavior of git-gui like "git status -uno" and "git ls-files", which both don't attempt to scan untracked files. My problem is that my build makes a lib_Linux/ and a bin_linux/ subdirectory of my source dir - I could declare them in a gitignore, OK. But my build also makes a symlink for each <exe> from bin_Linux/<exe> to . and I don't want to declare these links one by one in an ignore list. I this is too problematic or un-natural for git-gui I will see if can generate a .gitignore automatically in each source dir. In my makefile I have the list of <exe>. Regards -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html