Make .gitignore ignore everything except a few files

Question

I understand that a .gitignore file cloaks specified files from Git\'s version control. I have a project (LaTeX) that generates lots of extra files (.auth, .dvi, .pdf, logs,

Answer 1

I seem to have found something that worked for me which no one else mentioned.

# Ignore everything
*

# But not these files...
!.gitignore
!script.pl
!template.latex
# etc...

# And if you want to include a sub-directory and all sub-directory and files under it, but not all sub-directories
!subdir/
!subdir/**/*

Basically, it seems to negate a sub-directory from being ignored, you have to have two entries, one for the sub-directory itself !subdir/ and then another one which expands to all files and folders under it !subdir/**/*