Ignoring files

Often, you will have a set of files that you don’t want to commit and don’t want Git to automatically add or even show you as being untracked. These are generally automatically generated files such as log files or artifacts produced by your build process. For such cases, git provides a mechanism to ignore such files. You can create a file listing patterns to match them named .gitignore.

.gitignore also support wildcards and regular expressions. For example:

# ignore all files having .log extension
*.log

# ignore any files ending in ".o" or ".a"
*.[oa] 

*~ # ignore all files whose names end with a tilde (~)

# only ignore the TODO file in the current directory, not subdir/TODO
/TODO

# ignore all files in any directory named build
build/

# ignore doc/notes.txt, but not doc/server/arch.txt
doc/*.txt

# ignore all .pdf files in the doc/ directory and any of its subdirectories
doc/**/*.pdf

📋 In this exercise you will ignore files from getting tracked:

• create a file called .gitignore in the root of your project folder and add NOTES inside it.
• check the status
• commit the .gitignore file to the repository.

Not sure how?

```shell # adding NOTES to .gitignore echo "NOTES" > .gitignore # check git status git status # staging .gitignore git add .gitignore # commiting git commit -m "adding .gitignore" ```