Gitignore not working

Question

My  gitignore file isn t working for some reason  and no amount of Googling has been able to fix it  Here is what I have     apk   ap    dex   class    bin     gen   gradle  build  local properties    proguard    log   It s in the directory master  which is my git repo  I m running Git 1 8 4 2 because I m on a MacBook running OSX 10 8 6

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I used something to generate common  gitignore for me and I ran into this   After reading  Ozesh answer I opened in VS Code because it has a nice indicator at bottom right showing type of line endings   It was LF so I converted to CRLF as suggested but no dice   Then I looked next to the line endings and noticed it was saved using UTF16   So I resaved using UTF8 encoding an voila  it worked   I didn t think the CRLF mattered so I changed it back to LF to be sure and it still worked   Of course this wasn t OPs issue since he had already committed the files so they were already indexed  but thought I d share in case someone else stumbles across this   TLDR  If you haven t already committed the files and  gitignore still isn t being respected then check file encoding and  make sure its UTF8 and if that doesn t work then maybe try messing with line endings

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Also  comments have to be on their own line  They can t be put after an entry  So this won t work    node modules    DON T COMMENT HERE  since nullifies entire line    But this will work     fine to comment here  node modules

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After going down a bit of a bit of a rabbit hole trying to follow the answers to this question  maybe because I had to do this in a visual studio project   I found the easier path was to    Cut and paste the file s  I no longer want to track into a temporary location Commit the  deletion  of those files Commit a modification of the  gitignore to exclude the files I had temporarily moved Move the files back into the folder    I found this to be the most straight forward way to go about it  at least in a visual studio  or I would assume other IDE heave based environment like Android Studio   without accidentally shooting myself in the foot with a pretty pervasive git rm -rf --cached     after which the visual studio project I was working on didn t load

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I solved my problem doing the following   First of all  I am a windows user  but i have faced similar issue  So  I am posting my solution here   There is one simple reason why sometimes the  gitignore doesn t work like it is supposed to  It is due to the EOL conversion behavior   Here is a quick fix for that  Edit   EOL Conversion   Windows Format   Save  You can blame your text editor settings for that   For example   As i am a windows developer  I typically use Notepad   for editing my text unlike Vim users   So what happens is  when i open my  gitignore file using Notepad    it looks something like this      Ignore Visual Studio temporary files  build results  and    files generated by popular Visual Studio add-ons        Get latest from https   github com github gitignore blob master VisualStudio gitignore     See https   help github com ignore-files  for more about ignoring files     User-specific files   suo   user   userosscache   sln docstates   dll   force   User-specific files  MonoDevelop Xamarin Studio    userprefs   If i open the same file using the default Notepad  this is what i get     Ignore Visual Studio temporary files  build results  and    files generated by popular Visual Studio add-ons        Get latest from  https   github com github gitignore blob master VisualStudio gitignore   See https   help github com ignore-files  for more about ignoring files    User-specific files   suo   user   userosscache    So  you might have already guessed by looking at the output  Everything in the  gitignore has become a one liner  and since there is a    in the start  it acts as if everything is commented   The way to fix this is simple  Just open your  gitignore file with Notepad     then do the following  Edit   EOL Conversion   Windows Format   Save  The next time you open the same file with the windows default notepad  everything should be properly formatted  Try it and see if this works for you

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The files folder in your version control will not just delete themselves just because you added them to the  gitignore  They are already in the repository and you have to remove them  You can just do that with this  Remember to commit everything you ve changed before you do this  git rm -rf --cached   git add    This removes all files from the repository and adds them back  this time respecting the rules in your  gitignore

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Ahmad s answer is working but if you just want to git ignore 1 specific file or few files do as  Nicolas suggests step 1 add filename to  gitignore file step 2  remove filename  file path  from git cache git rm --cached filename setp 3 commit changes git add filename git commit -m  quot add filename to  gitignore quot  it will keep your git history clean because if you do git rm -r --cached   and add back all and commit them it will pollute your git history  it will show that you add a lot of files at one commit  not sure am I expressing my thought right but hope you get the point

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Adding my bit as this is a popular question   I couldn t place  history directory inside  gitignore because no matter what combo I tried  it just didn t work  Windows keeps generating new files upon every save and I don t want to see these at all      But then I realized  this is just my personal development environment on my machine  Things like  history or  vscode are specific for me so it would be weird if everyone included their own  gitignore entries based on what IDE or OS they are using   So this worked for me  just append   history  to  git info exclude  echo   history   gt  gt   git info exclude

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Does git reset --hard work for anyone  I am not saying this is a good solution  it just seemed to work first time I tried

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In my case whitespaces at the end of the lines of  gitignore was the cause  So watch out for whitespaces in the  gitignore

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To untrack a single file that has already been added initialized to your repository  i e   stop tracking the file but not delete it from your system use  git rm --cached filename  To untrack every file that is now in your  gitignore   First commit any outstanding code changes  and then  run this command   git rm -r --cached     This removes any changed files from the index staging area   then just run   git add     Commit it   git commit -m   gitignore is now working

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In my case it was a blank space at the beginning of the file which showed up clearly when I opened the file in Notepad  wasn t obvious in Visual Studio Code

[git] Gitignore not working

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