Question

I have a git repository hosted on Github. After committing many files, I am realizing that I need to create .gitignore and exclude .exe, .obj files.

However, will it automatically remove these committed files from the repository? Is there any way to force that?

Answer 1

No you cannot force a file that is already committed in the repo to be removed just because it is added to the .gitignore

You have to git rm --cached to remove the files that you don’t want in the repo. ( –cached since you probably want to keep the local copy but remove from the repo. ) So if you want to remove all the exe’s from your repo do

git rm --cached /\*.exe

(Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell – this lets git, and not the shell, expand the pathnames of files and subdirectories)