Commiting all files ignores the ones in .gitignore?

Question

I'm new at Git, so my question is:

Using

git commit -a -m "Message"

Will respect the .gitignore file? If I run

git add *

It says cannot do it since there are files changed and marked as being ignore.

Answer 1

The -a flag in git-commit does not commit all the files in the working directory, simply the ones that already exist in the repository that have changed. This is different from git add * which uses the shell expansion of * to add all of the files to staging, even the ones that git has not managed before.

(From git-commit man page)

-a --all

Tell the command to automatically stage files that have been modified and deleted, but new files you have not told git about are not affected.