Exclude everything in a directory except a subdir and its files

[rieje]

I'm trying to exclude all files in ~/.firejail but include all files in ~/.firejail/<any dir>/Downloads/ . The following in .ignore doesn't seem to do that and ignores all files in ~/.firejail, any ideas?

/.firejail/ 
!/.firejail/**/Downloads/*

If I uncomment the first one /.firejail/ then all its files show. Looking at the .gitignore syntax this is what I understand should work, i.e. "exclude everything in /.firejail/, except those in /.firejail/**/Downloads/*.

P.S. If I pass in multiple ignore files and some of them share the same rules, is that a problem and I need to resolve them (e.g. read all the rules, removing duplicates then write them out to a tmp file and pass that to --ignore-file?

[tmccombs]

The way gitignore, and fd ignore files, works is if a folder is excluded, it isn't traversed at all. So there isn't a way to re-add a child of an ignored file.

Maybe you could do something like:

/.firejail/**
!/.firejail/**/Downloads/*

Although then .firejail itself would be included

[rieje]

That doesn't show any results under /.firejail except /.firejail itself. Upon looking around further, it doesn't seem to be possible with gitignore syntax. My workaround is to just ignore the parent (/.firejail), then give fd the arguments ~/.firejail/**/Downloads/ (techinically there's a limit to CLI arguments so it's not scalable).