Git Ignores and Maven targets

Question:

Anyone know if it is possible to ignore all the instances of a particular directory in a file structure managed by git.

I’m looking to exclude all the ‘target’ folders in a maven project with a number of submodules. I know I can explicitly exclude each of them in a top level .gitignore, but I’d really like to be able to specify a pattern like **/target/* there to have it automatically ignore the instance in sub directories?

Is this possible?

Answer:

It is possible to use patterns in a .gitignore file. See the gitignore man page. The pattern */target/* should ignore any directory named target and anything under it. Or you may try */target/** to ignore everything under target.

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