The Complete Guide to .gitignore Pattern Syntax

Each line of a .gitignore is one pattern. The syntax looks similar to shell globs, but its meaning changes a lot depending on where the slashes are and where ** appears. The content below is based on the official git documentation gitignore(5), and the examples were verified directly with git 2.50.

Blank lines, comments and escaping

• A blank line matches nothing. Use it as a separator for readability.
• A line starting with # is a comment. To ignore a file whose name starts with #, add a backslash, as in \#.
• Spaces at the end of a line are ignored. If you need a file name that ends with a space, protect the space with a backslash, as in foo\ . Spaces at the start of a line remain part of the pattern.
• A line starting with ! is a negation pattern. For a file whose name starts with !, write \!important.txt.

Trailing spaces are invisible and a common source of mistakes. If a rule does not take effect, turn on whitespace display in your editor. Also remember that only space characters are stripped; tabs are not.

Trailing slash: matches directories only

If a pattern ends with /, it matches only directories. build/ ignores a directory named build and everything inside it, but does not ignore a file named build. Conversely, writing build without a slash matches both files and directories with that name.

A slash anchors the position

If the rest of the pattern, excluding a trailing slash, contains a / at the beginning or in the middle, the pattern matches only paths relative to the directory containing the .gitignore file. This is often called anchoring. Without a /, git looks for entries with a matching name at any depth below the .gitignore.

The third row is especially confusing. logs/debug.log has a slash in the middle, so it is anchored to the root and means the same as prefixing it with /. To catch logs/debug.log at any depth, use **/logs/debug.log.

Wildcards: *, ?, [ ]

• * matches any string except / (including the empty string). *.log matches both app.log and a/b/app.log, but logs/*.log matches only logs/app.log, not logs/2026/app.log.
• ? matches any single character except /. file?.txt matches file1.txt but not file10.txt.
• [a-z] matches one character in the range, and [!a-z] or [^a-z] matches one character outside the range. *.py[cod] catches .pyc, .pyo and .pyd at once. Brackets do not match / either.
• POSIX character classes such as [[:digit:]] can also be used.

Two asterisks **

** has a special meaning only when it is adjacent to slashes.

In any other position, such as the ** in foo** or **bar, it behaves like a regular * and cannot cross slashes. docs/**/*.pdf matches both docs/manual.pdf and docs/a/b/manual.pdf, because /**/ also matches zero directories.

Putting it together in one small example

# Build output (only the build directory at the root)
/build/

# Log files at any depth, but keep the important log
*.log
!important.log

# All PDFs under docs
docs/**/*.pdf

# A file whose name starts with #
\#scratch.md

You can reproduce this table exactly by pasting the rules and paths into the generator's Pattern test tab.

References

• gitignore official documentation (git-scm.com)
• GitHub Docs: Ignoring files
• Verified as of: 2026-09-23 (examples checked with git 2.50.1)