Which GITIGNORE is ignoring the file?

If you are receiving the error message like below when you are trying to add a file into git repository - 

> git add a.log                                                                                                                                                    
The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files:                                                                                                   
a.log                                                                                                                                                              
hint: Use -f if you really want to add them.                                                                                                                       
hint: Disable this message with "git config advice.addIgnoredFile false"     

This means, .gitignore file is active in your shell environment and working as expected. The problem arise when you have enabled multiple .gitignore files active and you have to alter the file which is actually ignoring this particular file (a.log in our case). 

Git provides a very straight forward command to check which file and rules are actually ignoring the file, which is git check-ignore -v FILE 

Let's see, how to use that command and make sense of output printed - 

> git check-ignore -v a.log                                                                                                                                        
/Users/Atul/.oma_gitignore_global:25:*.log      a.log 

Here, the First part (/Users/Atul/.oma_gitignore_global) is the file name which is ignoring the file.

Second part (25) is the line no in gitignore file which has the ignore rule (*.log), which you can check as below - 

> head -25 /Users/Atul/.oma_gitignore_global | tail h                                                                                                          
*.log   

and the Last part (a.log) is the name of file which is being ignored. If that's a mistake, you now know which is ignoring the file, edit that as per your requirement. 

Happy Learning !!

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