Excluding files (and folders) with `git add`
When you're using git add, there is a chance that you might be in a situation where you want to include a bunch of files (or folders) but exclude only some of them. Adding each file one by one manually is, of course, unthinkable, but thankfully there is a very short and sweet way to do it.
Here comes the magical command:
git add -A ':!<file_path>'
git add -A ':!<file_path>'
In my case, I had to rename a lot of folders, and wanted to git add them all at once, but exclude one of the untracked folders and a couple of other modified files.
Besides tons of other deleted files, git status was showing this:
Since I wanted to exclude only the list-ops folder and the wordy files, I had to use the command:
git add -A ':!list-ops' ':!wordy/wordy.py' ':!wordy/wordy_test.py'
git add -A ':!list-ops' ':!wordy/wordy.py' ':!wordy/wordy_test.py'
And, it worked 🎉:
All thanks to Chirag Chhuchha's blog post.