git - Regex-like shell glob patterns for gitignore

Question

When I compile my C++ project, many shared object files are created with extensions such as

.so
.so.0
.so.7
.so.0.7

I need to add all those to my .gitignore file. Were this a regex, I could use

.so[.0-9]*

However, the documentation says that .gitignore

treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag

I found no way to do what I want with the fnmatch documentations I found. Is there really no way to do this?

Answer 1

While the answer by @SpeakEasy can ignore .so files in a single step using *.so*, for your use case of ignoring files in formats specified, you can use two entries in your .gitignore for more specific ignore rule

*.so
*.so.[0-9]*

---

From gitignore man page

Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern.

Git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for consumption by fnmatch

The important thing to note is that the pattern is not the same as regular expressions.

Python has a module named fnmatch, you can use that to verify whether a particular filename matches the pattern or not.

Sample example:

import fnmatch
pattern = "*.so.[0-9]*"
filenames = ["a.so", "b.so.0", "b.so.11", "b.so.1.0", "b.so.1.0.12"]

for filename in filenames:
    print filename, fnmatch.fnmatch(filename, pattern)

>>> a.so False
    b.so.0 True
    b.so.11 True
    b.so.1.0 True
    b.so.1.0.12 True