Nonono. This makes sense.
It ignores all other gitignore files in all subdirectories.
It would be one way to enforce concentrating all ignores into this file (or its ancestors).
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
428 points (98.9% liked)
Programmer Humor
33571 readers
1225 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
- If the mod doesn't find it funny, you're banned. Ha-ha!... For real: do not use the community for "statements". There are other places for such content. Keep it chill and funny.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Had a quick playaround with it:
- Yes, that does prevent gitignore files from being committed.
- It does not prevent locally-created gitignore files from being applied.
But I'd say the latter is overall a good thing, as some build tools will do a echo "*" > build/.gitignore to have their build-folder add itself to the ignore-list.
Ooh, uncomittable files are still honoured. That's mildly interesting, I can see it being both useful and maddening.
Git ignore doesn't prevent things from being committed it just prevents them from being "tracked" (for lack of a better word) by default. If you manually explicitly add the file to a commit, and then commit the file will be tracked despite matching the ignore
Yeah, poorly worded on my part.
You can always have local ignore files too (like for your personal IDE or whatever)
What's the benefit of scripting the wildcard gitignore over just adding build/ to the root gitignore? I guess being build directory name agnostic?
Well, if you're the build tool that creates that build-folder, then it just means you don't need to bother your user with adding it to the root gitignore.
One time, I implemented it for basically a repo-specific download cache folder. Ideally, my users don't need to know of that folder at all.
Or recently, I implemented it for a build tool where my users might not be devs. They might not use Git at all, or not be very adept at it, so I'm glad to not need to document it...
Does it prevent the initial .gitignore from being commited too?
For example, what if a file name had sensitive information. It's bad practice, but someone might want to ignore the file while also hiding the ignore rule itself.
/test/fake-person-first-last.json
/test/real-person-first-last.json
Someone might want to selectively omit the second file while keeping the first, but not show what they are hiding.
.gitignore doesn’t prevent things from being committed. It just tells git to ignore files that aren’t already being tracked. And you can easily override that with -f. Putting .gitignore inside of .gitignore will ignore itself (if it’s not already tracked).
If you're an end user, not a build tool, you'd rather want to place that in .git/info/exclude inside the repo. It's effectively another gitignore file, which won't be committed.
But if you do need something like this for a build tool, then yeah, you can create a file /test/.gitignore with these contents:
real-person-first-last.json
.gitignore
Then running git add . just adds /test/fake-person-first-last.json.
Both /test/.gitignore and /test/real-person-first-last.json would be ignored right away.
FYI there is a command to ignore specific files locally: git update-index --skip-worktree <file_name> from here. And you can later unignore it with --no-skip-worktree
funnily enough I did that and sometimes do in some projects in order to locally not commit IDE stuff or test folders.
if I want to update the .gitignore in such cases I test local and change in the remote.
Out of curiousity, I searched about it. Turned out, there were actually people who wanted to ignore the gitignore file. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10176875/add-gitignore-to-gitignore
Some teams use the same tools with the same configurations so they can get each other's code immediately.
Other teams solve the problem of how to just send or get the parts that work, and leave everybody do whatever.
