Gitignore not working

Question

My .gitignore file isn't working for some reason, and no amount of Googling has been able to fix it. Here is what I have:

*.apk
*.ap_
*.dex
*.class
**/bin/
**/gen/
.gradle/
build/
local.properties
**/proguard/
*.log

It's in the directory master, which is my git repo. I'm running Git 1.8.4.2 because I'm on a MacBook running OSX 10.8.6.

Answer 1

After going down a bit of a bit of a rabbit hole trying to follow the answers to this question (maybe because I had to do this in a visual studio project), I found the easier path was to

1. Cut and paste the file(s) I no longer want to track into a temporary location

2. Commit the "deletion" of those files

3. Commit a modification of the .gitignore to exclude the files I had temporarily moved

4. Move the files back into the folder.

I found this to be the most straight forward way to go about it (at least in a visual studio, or I would assume other IDE heave based environment like Android Studio), without accidentally shooting myself in the foot with a pretty pervasive git rm -rf --cached . , after which the visual studio project I was working on didn't load.