The entire original article:

I initialised a new Git repository, and added a .gitignore file instructing git to ignore .gitignore:

git init . echo ".gitignore" > .gitignore git status

And the result:

On branch trunk No commits yet nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

Therefore, we can see Git ignores .gitignore because its in .gitignore, which means it didn’t ignore .gitignore for instructions.

Is any of this informative, surprising, or useful? … Absolutely.