I occasionally run into a situation with Git where I have modified a file but have no intention of committing the change to the repository. This most often happens with computer specific configuration files. My config/database.yml in Rails projects can spend a lot of time in a dirty state if one of my dev machines has a root mysql password and the other does not.

Git will ignore untracked files that are added to .gitignore files or the .git/info/exclude file. For files that git knows about and is already tracking there is a obscure way to tell git to ignore changes to those files.

git update-index --assume-unchanged config/database.yml

When you have made changes to the file that you want to commit you'll need to execute the inverse (--no-assume-unchanged) for git to acknowledge that the file has changed.

References:

• git-update-index
• gitignore(5)

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Be careful when running rspec with the --timeout option. When the timeout occurs the test process will be interrupted and it will print out a stack trace for wherever it was executing when it was interrupted. This can lead to a lot of confusion if you do not immediately realize it was the result of timing out and instead think that an exception actually occurred at that point.