Using .gitignore with *.pyc in subfolders

Question

I see that with python 3, there is a __pycache__ in each subfolder of my application and of course *.pyc files will be created there as well. In my .gitignore of my app's root folder, can I simply place:

**/__pycache__
**/*.pyc

to have these ignored in all future subfolders created? Or do I need to place a .gitignore in each and every subfolder ?

On a related note, how do I check what all is being untracked (ignored). I tried "git status -u" and it does not show __pycache__ or .pyc files as being untracked.

Solution

You should not need the **/:

 __pycache__/
 *.pyc

That should be enough.

See for instance gitignore.io/python.
Note the practice of adding a trailing / to ignore specifically a folder.

Use git check-ignore -v -- afile (that I mentioned in Sept. 2013, with Git 1.8.2+) to check which rule ignores a file.
If the folder was already tracked:

git rm --cached -r __pycache__/

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André Duarte adds in the comments:

After adjusting gitignore, I had to do this for every file, so I call awk for help:

git status | grep pycache | awk '{print $3}' | xargs git reset HEAD