git rm --cached everything that is listed in .gitignore

Question

I added .gitignore to my project after I had everything commited. Now I want to run a command like:

git rm --cached *everything_listed_in_gitignore*

How can this be achieved? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

I'm always using the following line to remove files listed in my .gitignore:

grep -vP "^(#|\$)" .gitignore|sed "s/^\///"|xargs rm -f

1. This will find lines in .gitignore that do not match (-v option to grep) the regular expression ^(#|\$) matching lines that start with # (comments) or empty lines.

2. Then sed will remove a forward slash / at the start of the line.

3. The results are passed to rm -f using xargs, which you could replace with git rm --cached

Note:

Your .gitignore file can contain entries like *.tmp to ignore all .tmp files throughout the project. The above command would only remove *.tmp files from the root. Only full paths will be handled correctly.