Say I have these files and directories [2]: /home/smart_tator/misc_files/.gitignore /home/smart_tator/misc_files/foo/ /home/smart_tator/misc_files/bar/ /home/smart_tator/misc_files/bar/baz/foo/ /home/smart_tator/misc_files/bar/baz/real/ then I do: cd /home/smart_tator/misc_files/; git init and say I have this line in that .gitignore file: foo/ And then I naively execute: git add bar/ then the bar/baz/real/ is added, but these are dutifully ignored: /home/smart_tator/misc_files/foo/ /home/smart_tator/misc_files/bar/baz/foo/ But consider in my real repo, I have thousands of files, versus the Tinker Toy example shown above. And consider that I don't know about that bar/baz/foo/ exists ahead of time, because I'm not the only developer checking in content to the repo that might contain precious "foo/"'s to keep. I can't move my top level foo/, as I have tools that rely upon that foo/ being in its place. That means that we can't solve this problem efficiently/effectively with the negation operator in the .gitignore file: foo/ !bar/baz/foo/ because sooner or later someone is going to get surprised as to why their foo/ isn't being added in some other subdirectory, and they will "fix it" by committing a change where they have removed the foo/ from the .gitignore file, thus causing the top level foo/ to show up as candidates for addition in git status output. Is there some way to express that the foo/ that is to be ignored is always the one in /home/smart_tator/misc_files/ directory, but all other foo/ subdirectories in any other directory under consideration should still continue to participate in adds and merges, all without having to "over-express" the exceptions with negation operators? Maybe the imaginary .gitignore syntax I am thinking of would be one of the following (most of these are just silly/fun): </>foo/ # <-- Huh? <top>foo/ # <-- What the ...? //foo/ # <-- Smells like Perforce or Windows UNC paths /foo/ # <-- No! Matches UNIX root filesystem directory paths! >foo/ # <-- You can't have a > character in DOS or Unix paths, can you? $root/foo/ # <-- I like this syntax the best [1] Thanks, bg [1] Maybe there are other "variables" besides $root that might be useful to be added in the future, like $HOME. [2] By "repo root directory", I mean whatever "$GIT_DIR/.." resolves to. -- 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