Hi guys, Maybe I'm doing it wrong, or maybe it's the intended behaviour, but I find that a trailing whitespace after a pattern in .gitignore makes the pattern void with git 1.8.1.5. It's a subtle error to make, although cleaning undesired commits from the git history can be educational and fun in itself. How to reproduce: $ > mkdir -p ~/tmp/git-ignore-test/ \ && cd ~/tmp/git-ignore-test/ \ && touch .gitignore .secret-passwords .secret-passwords.swp \ && echo ".*.sw? " > .gitignore \ && echo ".secret-passwords" >> .gitignore \ && git init && git status Remove the white space after ``` .*.sw?``` in .gitignore to see the .swp file disappear: $ > echo -e ".*.sw?\n.secret-passwords" > .gitignore > .gitignore \ && git status You will of course have to temporarily disable your global .gitignore file if you handle vim swap files correctly there. I am using git 1.8.1.5 installed with homebrew on os x 10.8.2. -- 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