git still shows files as untracked despite .gitign

Question

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong in this case with my .gitignore file, but these files keep showing up.

Background

I'm using Jekyll to build a blog. Jekyll generates _site and .sass-cache directories when it begins serving.

I previously committed these directories before realizing I wanted to ignore them.

To be overly cautious, I added all of the following lines to my .gitignore:

##Jekyll
/_site/
_site/
_site
/.sass-cache/
.sass-cache/
.sass-cache

Since I knew I'd committed these files previously, I:

• Committed the updated .gitignore file.
• did a git rm -r --cached .
• deleted the _site and .sass-cache folders
• ran a git add . and git status showed that the working directory was clean

Problem

Despite all of that, the updated .gitignore file, and verifying (I think?) that things are clean and good, whenever I run bundle exec jekyll serve and jekyll generates the files, I see .sass-cache and _site show up in my untracked files.

Question

• What am I doing wrong here? Is my .gitignore formed improperly?
• How can I ensure that git never shows these directories in the untracked list?

The .gitignore in its current state can be found here.

Answer 1

Your .gitignore file is currently detected as UTF-16LE encoded. Changing encoding to UTF-8 is the solution.

To fix:

• Open the .gitignore file in a text editor such as Notepad++
• Change the encoding (in np++, this is via the Encoding menu) to UTF-8 without BOM
• Save the file.
• Add the .gitignore file into staging
• git commit -m "fixed ignore file"

At this point, the ignore file should start working correctly.