Ignore symbolic links in .gitignore

Question

Is it possible to tell Git to ignore symlinks ? I'm working with a mixed Linux / Windows environment and, as you know, symlinks are handled very differently between the two.

Solution 1

Use git version >= 1.6

Git used to treat sym-links the same as regular files, but newer git versions (>= 1.6) check if a file is beyond a symbolic link and will throw a fatal error.

e.g.:

# git init 
# mkdir newdir 
# touch newdir/foo 
# git add newdir/foo 
# git commit -m 'add foo' 
# mv newdir /tmp/ 
# ln -s /tmp/newdir 
# touch newdir/bar 
# git add newdir/bar 
fatal: 'newdir/bar' is beyond a symbolic link

# git add/tmp/newdir
fatal: '/tmp/newdir' is outside repository

# git --version
git version 1.7.3.4

Solution 2

No, it is not possible to do this globally. However, if you have lots of symlinks here is a bash script that you can use to easily add them to your repo's .gitignore file:

for f in $(git status --porcelain | grep '^??' | sed 's/^?? //'); do
    test -L "$f" && echo $f >> .gitignore; # add symlinks
    test -d "$f" && echo $f\* >> .gitignore; # add new directories as well
done

Comments

[Izkata]

git 1.7.9.5 adds symlinks just fine, even when they point to something outside the repository...

[Matthias Kleine]

Awesome solution! Works very fine :) Thank you very much!