Intellij VCS is ignoring entire submodules that should not be ignored

Question

Recently in my IJ project, a number of modules and submodules (and all the directories/files nested therein) have become highlighted yellow, which according to Preferences > Version Control > File Status Colors means those directories/files are being ignored by IJ's VCS integration. The modules are not listed in .gitignore , and changes to them are reflected in calls to git status , yet IJ thinks these modules should be ignored by VCS, meaning I no longer get helpful things like highlighting of edited/deleted/added rows.

Up until now things have been working smoothly in this regard and I'm not sure what changed to cause the modules to be ignored, or how to get them back to their previous status.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If my project is located at

/path/to/project/

there is a file that needed to be generated at

/path/to/project/module/submodule/target/

But due to some faulty path handling, the file was being generated at

/path/to/project/module/submodule/\/path/to/project/module/submodule/target/

I still don't know why , but the existence of that \\ directory in the submodule was enough to tell IJ to ignore the entire submodule. Deleting the directory and restarting IJ solved the problem