I have a question about adding files in git. I have found multiple stackoverflow questions about the difference between git add . and git add -a, git add --all, git add -A, etc. But I've been unabl... More on stackoverflow.com

I don't get what the Git command means, when adding files to the stage with the use of a period (or full stop, single dot): git add . What does this do? More on stackoverflow.com

git add * instructs your shell to expand the glob. Whatever the shell expands that to is passed to git add. This can have a variety of effects since git add accepts pathspecs, not filenames, and certain "magic" pathspecs have special behaviour. For instance, a pathspec that begins with :^ can be used to negate matches (e.g. git add file.* :^file.jpg could be used to add all filenames matching file.*, but not add file.jpg). If you must get the shell to do the globbing (described below are some ways in which you can avoid having the shell perform the globbing), you could consider using git add -- * instead. This won't avoid the "magic" pathspec issue, but it will avoid any issues with filenames that happen to have a leading hyphen (just imagine how annoying it would be to have a file named -A). git add . instructs Git to add and (on modern versions of Git) remove files from the index so that it matches the contents of the current directory, and recursively all subdirectories. git add -A is identical to git add . (edit: when run from the top directory) on modern versions of Git. As noted above, older versions of Git did not remove files from the index with git add ., but they did with git add -A. You missed one: git add '*'. This instructs Git to perform the globbing instead of your shell. This has two effects. First, it means that filenames that just happen to be "magic" pathspecs won't actually invoke their magic (i.e. if a file is named :^file.jpg it won't do that negation thing I described above). Second, the globbing behaves slightly differently from the shell: in particular, * and ? can match a directory separator, which means git add '*.txt' would actually add all files ending with .txt in the current directory and any descendent directory. More on reddit.com

git add tells git that it should track changes made to a particular file. Useful if you don't necessarily want to track all changes to all files in the index at every commit. git commit is like a save button. Up until that point all changes since the last commit are still just "staged" and not yet permanently written into the local git repo. This command tells git to permanently store changes made to the files you selected using git add as a node in the git tree. git commit -a is a shortcut for "save all changes to all known files in the index". It's the same as if you git add'ed all the files you're already tracking and then ran git commit. No new files will be tracked, so if something / someone writes junk like temporary files they won't get swept up into the repo. I understand how to use it but don't quite understand why it is necessary to use 'git add --> git commit --> git push', instead of just 'git commit --> git push'. It's just the way git is designed. At each commit you have to tell git "I want changes to these files to be tracked" (git add), "Save those changes to my local repo" (git commit), and "Send my changes to a remote repo" (git push). If all you want to do is track changes to the same files every time, that's what git commit -a is for. More on reddit.com