git: How do I recursively add all files in a directory subtree that match a glob pattern?

Question

I have several .screen files inside /xxx/documentation and its subdirectories that are already tracked by Git.

After modifying many of these screen files, I run git add documentation/\\*.screen—as indicated by the first example in git-add's documentation—to stage these files, but the command fails:

fatal: pathspec 'documentation/\*.screen' did not match any files

Is my command bad, or does git have a bug?

Solution 1

It's a bug in the documentation. Quote the asterisk with

$ git add documentation/\*.screen

or

$ git add 'documentation/*.screen'

to get the behavior you want.

If instead you want to add files in the current directory only, use

$ git add *.screen

UPDATE: I submitted a patch that corrects the issue, now fixed as of version 1.6.6.2.

Solution 2

I've tried the accepted answer, but it didn't worked for me.. so here's mine just in case someone wants to get it's job done without spending time in dissecting various aspects that might cause the problem:

find documentation -name "*.screen" | xargs git add -u

//the -u option to git-add adds to index just the files that were previously tracked and modified

Solution 3

This what I just used for a similar problem of git adding all the files in a directory:

find . | sed "s/\(.*\)/\"\1\"/g" | xargs git add 

For the original question the command would be:

find -name "*.screen" | sed "s/\(.*\)/\"\1\"/g" | xargs git add 

Note that I'm dealing with the case where a fully specified file name contains spaces. Thats why my answer. Edit the portion before the first | in order to pick out different files to add.

Solution 4

You told the shell to look for *.screen (i.e. exactly this string - which doesn't exist - instead of what you want "all files that end with .screen). Omit the \\ so the shell can do the file name expansion for you.

Solution 5

git add *.java works for me to add recursively all the java files

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