How can I Remove .iml files from a Git repository?

Question

How can I keep everyone's .iml files out of an existing git project?

(I'm on a Mac)

Answer 1

remove all existing offenders:

find . -name "*.iml" -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch

then add *.iml .gitignore:

echo *.iml >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore

and commit the change:

git commit -m '.iml banished!'

It's also possible to do this all at once:

find . -name "*.iml" -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch; echo *.iml >> .gitignore; git add .gitignore; git commit -m '.iml banished!'

Answer modified from benzado and Chris Redford's excellent answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/107921/2570689 to How can I Remove .DS_Store files from a Git repository?