title: How to ignore eclipse metadata but preserve the template?
body: <p>I've got an ARM project in Eclipse...Actually, I'm using the STM Workbench packaging of Base-CDT-Eclipse.</p>
  
  <p>I'm working with a few other guys and we're using a git server to push and pull from.</p>
  
  <p>However, everyone has a little bit different setup as far as where their toolchains are, OS's, etc.</p>
  
  <p>This is causing trouble, because we're git dummies, and when we push changes after working locally, we do</p>
  
  <pre><code>git add .
  git commit -m "some message"
  git push origin master
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And when we pull changes, we just do</p>
  
  <pre><code>git pull origin master
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And pray that there no one else did anything in the meantime, because we're afraid of merging differences, but that's a different story.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, this whole project has a few sub directories that include things like datasheets, Word documents, and what-not...but, it also includes the metadata for the Eclipse project.  So, the last person to commit also pushes their unique settings for things like tool-chain path, preferred builder, etc.  This breaks the other guys' setup and after each pull, everyone else has to manually update their project settings to fix this.</p>
  
  <p>So, what files are special to Eclipse for project settings and how can I tell git to ignore these files if they already exist?  They need to be available for, say, a <code>git clone</code> but they need to be ignored for subsequent <code>git push</code>'s and <code>git pull</code>'s.</p>