git - Why doesn't gitignore work in this case?

Question

I have two files I wish to ignore:

• .idea/workspace.xml
• someapp/src/.idea/workspace.xml

I thought adding this single rule to .gitignore will suffice:

.idea/workspace.xml

But it only catches the top-level .idea/workspace.xml (git status shows someapp/src/.idea/workspace.xml as untracked).

I also tried **/.idea/workspace.xml, but this doesn't work at all. Help?

Answer 1

This has changed in git 1.8.4

Use of platform fnmatch(3) function (many places like pathspec matching, .gitignore and .gitattributes) have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" to match "foo/bar", "foo/a/bar", etc.

**/.idea/workspace.xml should work now in this example.