Pragmatic Guide to Git

6	Staging Changes to Commit

Git uses a two-step process to get changes into the repository. The first step is staging changes through git add. Staging a change adds it to the index, or staging area. This sits between the working tree—your view of the repository—and the actual repository.

Through the staging area, you can control what is staged from the most coarse-grained—adding everything within the repository—down to editing the changes, line by line.

First you can select individual files or paths to add by calling git add and passing the filename or path as the parameter. Git adds everything under a path if you provide that. It uses standard shell-style wildcards, so wildcards work: base.* matches base.rb and base.py.