Question

I have a structure like so

SDI
|-.gitignore
\-webapp

In the SDI/webapp/app directory, when I run git rm -r --cached ., I see files like this removed

rm 'webapp/app/views/MyStuff/myGroups.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/MyStuff/userAdd.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/MyStuff/userEdit.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/auth/Secure/login.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/errors/404.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/errors/500.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/main.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/tags/auth/check.tag'
rm 'webapp/app/views/tags/generic.html'
rm 'webapp/app/views/tags/text.html'

My .gitignore contents are as follows

eclipse/
tmp/
bin/
tools/play-1.2.5/framework/pym/

Why is it removing ALL my files? I do have git config file.mode false as the only thing unique on this repository compared to other ones I have done in the past.

Answer 1

• In does not actually remove the files, it only remove the changes from the index. Your working space remains untouched.
• It does this, because you tell it to do so.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-rm.html

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.

and

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

and

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

I don’t know, what you want to achieve (because you didn’t tell), but the command does exactly, what it should and in the way it should.

.gitignore “just” tells git to not add changes to the index, when calling git add recursively (e.g. git add ., or git commit -a), or show them in git status (and probably other tools, but thats the most common use cases). Because changes to this files shouldn’t be staged anyway, git rm doesn’t affect them.