.gitignore is ignored by Git

Question

My .gitignore file seems to be being ignored by Git - could the .gitignore file be corrupt? Which file format, locale or culture does Git expect?

Answer 1

There's some great answers already, but my situation was tedious. I'd edited source of an installed PLM (product lifecycle management) software on Win10 and afterward decided, "I probably should have made this a git repo."

So, the cache option won't work for me, directly. Posting for others who may have added source control AFTER doing a bunch of initial work AND .gitignore isn't working BUT, you might be scared to lose a bunch of work so git rm --cached isn't for you.

!IMPORTANT: This is really because I added git too late to a "project" that is too big and seems to ignore my .gitignore. I've NO commits, ever. I can git away with this :)

First, I just did:

rm -rf .git
rm -rf .gitignore

Then, I had to have a picture of my changes. Again, this is an install product that I've done changes on. Too late for a first commit of pure master branch. So, I needed a list of what I changed since I'd installed the program by adding > changed.log to either of the following:

PowerShell

# Get files modified since date.
Get-ChildItem -Path path\to\installed\software\ -Recurse -File | Where-Object -FilterScript {($_.LastWriteTime -gt '2020-02-25')} | Select-Object FullName

Bash

# Get files modified in the last 10 days...
find ./ -type f -mtime -10

Now, I have my list of what I changed in the last ten days (let's not get into best practices here other than to say, yes, I did this to myself).

For a fresh start, now:

git init .
# Create and edit .gitignore

I had to compare my changed list to my growing .gitignore, running git status as I improved it, but my edits in .gitignore are read-in as I go.

Finally, I've the list of desired changes! In my case it's boilerplate - some theme work along with sever xml configs specific to running a dev system against this software that I want to put in a repo for other devs to grab and contribute on... This will be our master branch, so committing, pushing, and, finally BRANCHING for new work!