git-add(1) Manual Page

git-add [-n] [-v] <file>…

A simple wrapper for git-update-index to add files to the index, for people used to do "cvs add".

<file>…

Files to add to the index.

-n

Don't actually add the file(s), just show if they exist.

-v

Be verbose.

The list of <file> given to the command is fed to git-ls-files command to list files that are not registered in the index and are not ignored/excluded by $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file or .gitignore file in each directory. This means two things:

1. You can put the name of a directory on the command line, and the command will add all files in it and its subdirectories;

2. Giving the name of a file that is already in index does not run git-update-index on that path.

git-add Documentation/\*.txt

Adds all *.txt files that are not in the index under Documentation directory and its subdirectories.

Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell in this example; this lets the command to include the files from subdirectories of Documentation/ directory.

git-add git-*.sh

Adds all git-*.sh scripts that are not in the index. Because this example lets shell expand the asterisk (i.e. you are listing the files explicitly), it does not add subdir/git-foo.sh to the index.

Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Documentation by Junio C Hamano and the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.

Part of the git(7) suite