Question

I am working through some tutorials for git and don’t understand the difference between running

git rm [path/to/file]

and

git rm -r [path/to/file]

What exactly does the recursive mean?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

From the git-rm man page:

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.

Thus git rm -r /path/to/file does the same as git rm /path/to/file and stages the file for removal. However git rm -r /path/to/directory removes the directory and recursively everything it contains.