Git ignore everything in directories but one file type

Question

I have this hierarchy, full of automatically generated folders:

| .gitignore
| ip
|   |ip1
|   |   |ip1.xci
|   |   |\other files\
|   |ip2
|   |   |ip2.xci
|   |   |\other files\
|   |ip3
|   |   |ip3.xci
|   |   |\other files\
|   |ip4
|   |   |ip4.xci
|   |   |\other files\
...

I want to write a rule to ignore everything but the.xci files (necessary to regenerate everything else), how do I write such a rule?

I have tried writing rules like:

ip/**/*
!ip/**/*.xci

but it doesn't work.

As I have understood it, git won't look for files in directories it has ignored even if the patter would match. Is there a way not to write a line for every file I want to keep? As other folders will be added.

Answer 1

You need to unignore directories to make git look into them:

ip/**/*
!ip/**/*/
!ip/**/*.xci

Answer 2

There is .gitignore file associated with every git repository if not just create one.

You can Ignore directories by entering the directory name into the file (with a slash appended):

dir_to_ignore/

More information is here .

You can mention all what you want to ignore there as extension as well for files