# Add A Range Of Filenames To gitignore

The `.gitignore` file is a file where you can list files that should be ignored
by git. This will prevent them from showing up in diffs, `git status`, etc.
Most entries in the `.gitignore` file will plainly correspond to a single file.

```
# ignore env var files
.env
.env.local
```

Sometimes a project has a bunch of similarly named files. Autogenerated files
are a prime example. For instance, a web app project may contain several
sitemap files with incrementing suffix values (i.e. `sitemap-1.xml`,
`sitemap-2.xml`, `sitemap-3.xml`, ...).

I'd like to avoid having to type those all out in my `.gitignore` file. And I
don't want to have to add new entries whenever another increment of the file is
generated.

I can handle all the current ones and future ones in a single line using some
range pattern matching supported by the `.gitignore` file format.

```
# ignore sitemap files
public/sitemap-[1-99].xml
```

This will ignore any sitemap files suffixed with 1 to 99. I don't really expect
there to ever be more than handful of those files, so _99_ should definitely do
the trick.

[source](https://www.golinuxcloud.com/gitignore-examples/#5_Examples_of_pattern_matching_in_gitignore)