.gitignore all the .DS_Store files in every folder and subfolder

Question

I've added .DS_Store to the .gitignore file, but it seems that it is only ignoring .DS_Store in the root directory, not in every folder and subfolder.

How do I fix this?

Answer 1

I think the problem you're having is that in some earlier commit, you've accidentally added .DS_Store files to the repository. Of course, once a file is tracked in your repository, it will continue to be tracked even if it matches an entry in an applicable .gitignore file.

You have to manually remove the .DS_Store files that were added to your repository. You can use

git rm --cached .DS_Store

Once removed, git should ignore it. You should only need the following line in your root .gitignore file: .DS_Store. Don't forget the period!

git rm --cached .DS_Store

removes only .DS_Store from the current directory. You can use

find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm --ignore-unmatch

to remove all .DS_Stores from the repository.

Felt tip: Since you probably never want to include .DS_Store files, make a global rule. First, make a global .gitignore file somewhere, e.g.

echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore_global

Now tell git to use it for all repositories:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

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