the gitignore rules work so that if a directory is ignored, all files in that directory are ignored. While that behavior isn't clearly documented in gitignore, this behavior is consistent across all git tools (status, ls-files, ...).
An exception is that listing the ignored files using "ls-files -i" doesn't behave the same way.
example:
$ mkdir d
$ touch d/f
$ echo /d/ > .gitignore
$ git ls-files -o --exclude-standard
.gitignore #d/f is correctly not listed
$ git ls-files -i --exclude-standard
#no output
d/f isn't listed even though it is treated as an ignored file by all other git tools. That seems inconsistent to me. Is that behavior intentionally or is this a bug?
A very similar question was asked before:
http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/git-ls-files-ignored-and-ignored-directory-tt7570641.html
but without an answer.