Today I solved a mystery: a file was being Git-ignored in a new project that didn't have a
.gitignore. Here's me learning this by trying and failing to add it:
$ git add destroy.sh
The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files:
destroy.sh
This output tells me some .gitignore is telling Git to ignore my script. Another way to confirm this is the check-ignore command:
$ git check-ignore destroy.sh
destroy.sh
The output here is the match; a file named destroy.sh is indeed being ignored. But how? We can answer that question
with the -v flag:
$ git check-ignore destroy.sh -v
/Users/dev/.gitignore:14:*.sh destroy.sh
My root .gitignore ignores all files ending in .sh on line 14. If I want this file in version control, I need to edit or go around that policy.