.gitignore everything but .c and .h recursively

Question

I would like to ignore everything in a certain folder and its subfolders, except for .c and .h files.

Yet locally, i need other files too. Do i

Answer 1

Ignoring * means ignore everything including top-level directories. After that git doesn't even look into subdirectories. To fix that unignore directories. Your entire .gitignore should look like this:

# Ignore all
*

# Unignore directories
!*/

# Unignore source code files
!source/**/*.c
!source/**/*.h

Another approach is to ignore everything but force-add necessary files with git add -f.

Answer 2

The problem is that the pattern

*

excludes all directories, too. According to the gitignore documentation,

It is not possible to re-include a file if a parent directory of that file is excluded.

To make this work, then, you'll need to use make sure that directories are not ignored. The gitignore pattern format does not provide a way to distinguish between directories and regular files, so you'll need to do that manually. One possibility would be to put a .gitignore file in each that directory that reincludes all its subdirectories, but it would be easier to just reinclude all directories. These can be matched (exclusively) with a pattern that ends with a '/':

!source/**/

Also, you are right when you say

But i think this also relates to the point in time, where i have to add the files, that should be ignored

in the sense that gitignore does not apply to files that are already tracked.