How to Add Linux Executable Files to .gitignore?

Question

How do you add linux executable files to .gitignore without giving them an explicit extension and without placing them in a specific or /bin directory? Most are named the same as the C file from which they were compiled without the ".c" extension.

Answer 1

Can you ignore all, but source code files?

For example:

*
!*.c
!Makefile

Answer 2

I wrote a script to automatically add ELF executables to .gitignore.

git-ignore-elf:

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
cd "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"
file=.gitignore
new=$file.new.$$
(
if [ -e "$file" ]; then
    cat "$file"
fi
find . -name .git -prune -o -type f ! -name '*.o' ! -name '*.so' \
    -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep ': *ELF ' | sed 's/:.*//' |
sed 's,^./,,'
) | perl -ne 'print if !$already{$_}++' >"$new"
mv "$new" "$file"

Features:

• starts looking from the top-level folder (might be a misfeature!)
• ignores ELF files, excluding .o and .so files which can be ignored with a generic rule
• preserves existing entries in .gitignore without duplicating them

This single-script version is here: http://sam.nipl.net/b/git-ignore-elf-1

Here is a more modular version, which depends on other scripts (git-root, find-elf, uniqo) from the same place: http://sam.nipl.net/b/git-ignore-elf

Answer 3

I would explicitly put them in the project .gitignore. It's not elegant, but I imagine your project doesn't have that many of them.

Answer 4

A way of generating differences against your .gitignore in one go from all the executable files from current dir:

find . -perm /111 -type f | sed 's#^./##' | sort | diff -u .gitignore -

this generates a diff meaning you don't lose any manual changes to the file. This assumes your .gitignore file is already sorted. The sed part just strips the leading ./ that find generates.

There's no automatic way to ignore only executable files, so you're always going to have to man-manage the file.

Answer 5

Most developers usually have a build directory in their project where the actual build process in run. So, all executables, .o, .so, .a, etc. are there and this build directory is added into the .gitignore.