I've long been confused by something in the man page for gitignore. I think it's unclear and I'd like to propose a change. The passage is this (source at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-manpages.git/tree/man5/gitignore.5):
Two consecutive asterisks ("**") in patterns matched against full
pathname may have special meaning:
o A leading "**" followed by a slash means match in all directories.
For example, "**/foo" matches file or directory "foo" anywhere, the
same as pattern "foo". "**/foo/bar" matches file or directory "bar"
anywhere that is directly under directory "foo".
...
In the first paragraph, it would be clearer to specify:
Two consecutive asterisks ("**"), in patterns matched against a full
pathname, are a wildcard representing some arbitrary number of nested
directories within that pathname:
In the second paragraph, I suggest removing the first pattern, "**/foo", since it is completely redundant. There are no circumstances when "**/foo" is necessary in place of plain "foo", and its presence muddies discussion.
Leading "**" may represent nested directories in a pathname, but is useful only before a _pattern_ containing nested directories. I suggest making that explicit. Here is how I propose to rewrite it:
o A leading "**", followed by a slash and a pattern containing nested
directories, means match that pattern in all pathnames.
For example, "**/foo/bar" matches file or directory "bar"
anywhere that is directly under directory "foo". It would match
"foo/bar", "other/foo/bar", "src/foo/bar/scram/gravy".
Thanks.
- dpb
