I want to exclude a folder named assets on top level of my git-repository. Other folders in subdirectories having the name assets/ should not be excluded, e.g /extension/assets/*)

The folder /assets was in the repo until now.

I created a file .gitignore on top level and wrote /assets/* into this file.

Now I called git add . and made a commit: git commit -m testcommit then git clean -in and then git clean -i
I would have thought, that the content of the folder /assets/* now should get removed. But nothing happens.

Calling git ls-files | grep assets shows me, that all /assets/* directories are still present.

Did I get something wrong?