How to git ignore file with same name as container directory?

Question

The file named as "project" is resultant of a build which produces a binary file with the same name as the container directory:

project/
    src/
    main.c
    project <-- binary file, same name as container directory

Being more general, how to ignore a file that have the same name as their container directory? Keep in mind that if "project" directory is renamed the resultant built file will change name too.

Answer 1

To match files with the same name as their containing directory you'd need a language more powerful than the shell globs that .gitignore uses, like regular expressions with backreferences.

The question of how to use regular expressions in .gitignore has been asked before ( Example ) and the answer has always been "You can't."

Get used to the idea that you have to update your .gitignore when you rename a directory.

Answer 2

You can specify a path starting with the root git directory in .gitignore . So for your example, you could put

/project/project

in your .gitignore . I'm not sure if there's a way in git to see the repository name and ignore same-names files, but since it seems like you're using a script (or makefile or whatever) to build what you're keeping in the repository, you should be able to write to .gitignore from that script. Something like

echo $projName"/"$projName > .gitignore

would work. You'd need to specify the location of .gitignore , depending on where your makefile/script is located.