.gitignore - ignore file starting with ~

Question

To ignore any file starting with ~(tilde), I put following in gitignore file

^~.*

But, it is not working for the file name starting with ~(eg. ~$ofession email.docx).

There is no issue with gitignore configuration setting as other patterns are working well.

What is wrong here with the regular expression?

Answer 1

Regular expressions are not supported in .gitignore , you can use globs only. To fix it, use ~* , that will ignore anything starts with tilde.

Answer 2

You may escape a character by surrounding it with "[]":

[~][$]*

This will ignore any Microsoft temporary/backup files.

Answer 3

^~.* is ignoring only files that only begin with ~. eg "~.txt" or "~.docx".

Change it to ^~*