Changes Not Staged For Commit in Git

There are 2 types of files detected by a git-status command:

1. Files that have been addded to Git with the git add command. These are called tracked files and appear under "Changes not staged for commit".
2. Files that Git does not know about, simply called untracked files.

Git does not automatically commit all these changes on git commit. They first need to be marked as ready to be commited, or staged for the next commit - as Git calls it. This is usually done using the git add command, which works for both tracked and untracked files.

# add+stage one file
$ git add /path/to/file

# add+stage all files, recursively
$ git add .

The git commit command will only commit the staged files by default, but it can also automatically stage and commit all the tracked files that have been modified with the -a (--all) option:

# commit previously staged files
$ git commit -m "Commit message"

# commit all files tracked by Git, without the need of git-add
$ git -a -m "Commit message"

For a complete list of all the options check the official Git docs: git-add, git-commit