How do negated patterns work in .gitignore?

Solution 1:

I think that what you actually want to do is:

aaa/*
!aaa/ccc

You're telling it "don't look in aaa" so it never even examines the path aaa/ccc. If you use the wildcard, it still reads the contents of aaa, then each entry matches the wildcard and is ignored, except aaa/ccc which gets put back in.

Solution 2:

If you want to exclude everything in aaa, but include aaa/ccc and everything beneath it, you should use:

aaa/*
!aaa/ccc
!aaa/ccc/*

The first line tells git to ignore everthing beneath aaa, the second tells it not to ignore the folder aaa/ccc which actually "enables" the third line which then tells it not to ignore everything beneath aaa/ccc.

Solution 3:

If anyone's still not seeing newly un-ignored items in a git status running a git update-index before hand can help git to see the changes (at least in version 1.9.x of gitbash).