Today I decided to find out how to clean up the repository. First I added this
.gitignore file to my repository:Then I searched the internet. The first hit from Google was this post by Aral Balkan. The content and the comments provided me with all the information I needed to manage the git repository.
Searching and cleaning the repository
An instance of a git repository can be thought of as an isolated file system. As such commands can be run against it the same way as a normal file system.The first command I needed was
git ls-files which works in the same way as ls. The command git ls-files -i -X .gitignore lists all the files in the repository which would have been excluded had I remembered to set the .gitigonre.Removing a file from git is done using the
git rm. As git is a versioned file system there is the file on disk and a reference to that file in the index. The command git rm --cached will remove the reference from the index but leave the file on disk.A script to do that
Manually removing each file from the index would take some time. It would also go against all of my computing instincts. The job needs a script.Here I simply loop round the results from
git ls-files sending each one to git rm. I am sure there are many ways to achieve the same result but this method worked well for me. I am using git bash and Windows.
4 comments:
Ooh, that's very pleasing.
I'm using bash and Windows as well, and some of my files have spaces in them.
This slight modification will include spaces as a part of the file name.
#!/bin/bash
SAVEIFS=$IFS
IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b")
for f in $(git ls-files -i -X .gitignore)
do
git rm --cached "$f"
done
IFS=$SAVEIFS
It's probably not the quickest way to do it, but it handles spaces in files names.
Hi Keith,
Very useful little script that.
Cheers
Excelent!
It can be made even simpler:
git rm --cached `git ls-files -i -X .gitignore`
note the backticks
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