Oh, I just meant caching within the lifetime of a single git command's execution. As it stands, when you run "git status", the git executable goes through each

Oh, I just meant caching within the lifetime of a single git command's execution. As it stands, when you run "git status", the git executable goes through each directory in your working copy, lists all of its directory entries, and then immediately afterward calls open() to see if a .gitignore file exists in that directory -- even if there wasn't one in the list it just read. That's what I meant by saying that in principle, there's no reason git couldn't just cache the file's presence/absence on its own, just for those few microseconds (maybe "cache" was a poor choice of words). In practice, I can understand that the implementation complexity might not be worth it.