Question

I keep running into a scenario where someone on our team pushes an initial commit without first adding a .gitignore to their project. This results in a bunch of files ending up in the repo that we don’t want tracked.

git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore
gives me a list of files that are ignored by .gitignore

and

git rm --cached <file>
lets me remove files one at a time from the repo, but keeps them in my working directory (which I want)

Is there a way I can pipe the file list from ls-files to rm --cached (or some other method altogether that will allow me to remove the tracked, ignored files from my repo)?

One of our team members wrote a shell script that uses regex to do it, but I’m looking for a command-line only solution (if one exists).

Answer 1

You can try:

git rm --cached $(git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore)

(Following the same idea than what works for deleted files in
“git remove files which have been deleted“, or in “git: how to add/commit removals made via vanilla rm?“, or “Removing multiple files from a Git repo that have already been deleted from disk“).

Or: a simple pipe could work too:

git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore | xargs -0 git rm --cached