How to do 'git status' on untracked directory?

Posted by meowsqueak on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by meowsqueak
Published on 2010-06-08T03:59:00Z Indexed on 2010/06/08 4:02 UTC
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I have 6,000 untracked files in one subdirectory and I'm constructing .gitignore files to filter out the unwanted ones. I'm testing my gitignore filters as I go by running 'git status'.

However, I have a larger number of untracked other files in a different subdirectory, so 'git status' shows all of those too, which makes it very hard to see what the .gitignore rules are doing.

If the files were tracked, then I could just do 'git status .' and it would restrict the git-status output to only those files in the current directory, but because the current directory and all its contents are untracked, 'git status .' returns "error: pathspec . did not match any file(s) known to git."

I'm using git-1.6.6.1 for this, although interestingly my testing shows that git-1.7.1 (on a different system) does actually let you do git-status on an untracked directory. Unfortunately I can't upgrade git on this system. Is there a known workaround for -1.6.6.1?

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