.gitignore file looks simple. However, if I ask you the question:

What’s the difference between log/* and log/?

I bet most people cannot tell correctly.

I came across this question when I did a .gitignore file clean-up in my project. It took me a while to understand the difference and I find it super easy to be forgotten. After looking up the manual and doing experiments several times, I decide to write this post. Hope it can help those who think about this question as well.

You can find the documentation of .gitignore file here.

Most rules are quite clear, however it does not include enough examples, especially for patterns involving /, the rules of which are not intuitive.

Let me rephrase them here. There are 3 basic rules for the patterns involving /:

1. If the pattern ends with /, the trailing slash is first removed then continue to process next rules. The matching result will be restricted to directory only.
2. If there is no / in the pattern, it uses the pattern to match all file or directory names regardless of the depth. For example, log matches log, log/ and abc/log. Another example with trailing slash, log/ matches log/, abc/log/ or abc/efg/log/.
3. If the pattern contains /, it uses the pattern to match the full path relative to the .gitignore file. That is, the full path will be considered rather than part of the filename. For example, shared/log will match shared/log or shared/log/, but not abc/shared/log

So based on these rules, there is a subtle difference between log/ and log/*.

For log/, it will be processed according to Rule 1 and 2, which means it matches any directory named log. For example, it matches log/, abc/log/ or abc/efg/log/, no matter how deep the directory is.

However for log/*, it will be processed according to Rule 3, which means it matches only files or directories under root log/ directory. Here ‘root’ is the current .gitignore file path. For example, it matches log/abc or log/efg/, but not abc/log or abc/log/.

See, the handling of trailing slash is a little bit counterintuitive.