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GIT-RM(1)                                             Git Manual                                            GIT-RM(1)



NAME
       git-rm - Remove files from the working tree and from the index

SYNOPSIS
       git rm [-f | --force] [-n] [-r] [--cached] [--ignore-unmatch] [--quiet] [--] <file>...


DESCRIPTION
       Remove files from the index, or from the working tree and the index. git rm will not remove a file from just
       your working directory. (There is no option to remove a file only from the working tree and yet keep it in the
       index; use /bin/rm if you want to do that.) The files being removed have to be identical to the tip of the
       branch, and no updates to their contents can be staged in the index, though that default behavior can be
       overridden with the -f option. When --cached is given, the staged content has to match either the tip of the
       branch or the file on disk, allowing the file to be removed from just the index.

OPTIONS
       <file>...
           Files to remove. Fileglobs (e.g.  *.c) can be given to remove all matching files. If you want Git to
           expand file glob characters, you may need to shell-escape them. A leading directory name (e.g.  dir to
           remove dir/file1 and dir/file2) can be given to remove all files in the directory, and recursively all
           sub-directories, but this requires the -r option to be explicitly given.

       -f, --force
           Override the up-to-date check.

       -n, --dry-run
           Don’t actually remove any file(s). Instead, just show if they exist in the index and would otherwise be
           removed by the command.

       -r
           Allow recursive removal when a leading directory name is given.

       --
           This option can be used to separate command-line options from the list of files, (useful when filenames
           might be mistaken for command-line options).

       --cached
           Use this option to unstage and remove paths only from the index. Working tree files, whether modified or
           not, will be left alone.

       --ignore-unmatch
           Exit with a zero status even if no files matched.

       -q, --quiet
           git rm normally outputs one line (in the form of an rm command) for each file removed. This option
           suppresses that output.

DISCUSSION
       The <file> list given to the command can be exact pathnames, file glob patterns, or leading directory names.
       The command removes only the paths that are known to Git. Giving the name of a file that you have not told Git
       about does not remove that file.

       File globbing matches across directory boundaries. Thus, given two directories d and d2, there is a difference
       between using git rm 'd*' and git rm 'd/*', as the former will also remove all of directory d2.

REMOVING FILES THAT HAVE DISAPPEARED FROM THE FILESYSTEM

       Typically you would first remove all tracked files from the working tree using this command:

           git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm -f


       and then untar the new code in the working tree. Alternately you could rsync the changes into the working
       tree.

       After that, the easiest way to record all removals, additions, and modifications in the working tree is:

           git add -A


       See git-add(1).

   Other ways
       If all you really want to do is to remove from the index the files that are no longer present in the working
       tree (perhaps because your working tree is dirty so that you cannot use git commit -a), use the following
       command:

           git diff --name-only --diff-filter=D -z | xargs -0 git rm --cached


   Submodules
       Only submodules using a gitfile (which means they were cloned with a Git version 1.7.8 or newer) will be
       removed from the work tree, as their repository lives inside the .git directory of the superproject. If a
       submodule (or one of those nested inside it) still uses a .git directory, git rm will fail - no matter if
       forced or not - to protect the submodule’s history.

       A submodule is considered up-to-date when the HEAD is the same as recorded in the index, no tracked files are
       modified and no untracked files that aren’t ignored are present in the submodules work tree. Ignored files are
       deemed expendable and won’t stop a submodule’s work tree from being removed.

       If you only want to remove the local checkout of a submodule from your work tree without committing the
       removal, use git-submodule(1) deinit instead.

EXAMPLES
       git rm Documentation/\*.txt
           Removes all *.txt files from the index that are under the Documentation directory and any of its
           subdirectories.

           Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell in this example; this lets Git, and not the shell,
           expand the pathnames of files and subdirectories under the Documentation/ directory.

       git rm -f git-*.sh
           Because this example lets the shell expand the asterisk (i.e. you are listing the files explicitly), it
           does not remove subdir/git-foo.sh.

SEE ALSO
       git-add(1)

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite