Remove all “deleted” files in Git

Question

Is there a better solution for removing manually-removed files from the Git repository than my current error-prone command ?

git status | grep deleted: | cut -d: -f2 | xargs git rm

Answer 1

I think you are asking to delete files from the index that were deleted from the working tree. The command git add -u will do that, in addition to adding any changes in the working tree (but not new files).

To do more exactly what you requested, the git-rm(1) manpage recommends the following, which is essentially the same as your solution but much less fragile.

If all you really want to do is to remove from the index the files that are no longer present in the working tree (perhaps because your working tree is dirty so that you cannot use git commit -a), use the following command:

git diff --name-only --diff-filter=D -z | xargs -0 git rm --cached

Answer 2

Hi i will point you to my script etckeeper-ng were i solved the same problem

https://github.com/tuxlover/etckeeper-ng/blob/master/modules/backup_git.sh

I will describe shortly how you could do it better:

First create a helper file which can be parsed.

git_status_file=/tmp/git_status_file
git status -s > $git_status_file

The git_status_file variable is in this case set to */tmp/git_status_file* The next i do is i use the $git_status_file as an input in a while loop:

while read line
do

  if [ $(echo $line |awk '{print $1}') == "D" 2> /dev/null ]
    then
      # git uses "" to denote files with spaces in their names
      # and does not use "" when the name has no spaces
      # so we must distinguish these two cases
      del_file=$(echo $line |awk -F\" '{print $2}'|| echo "no")       
      del_file_S=$(echo $line | awk '{print $2}')

      # ensures that del_file is a full string
      del_file="${del_file[*]}"


      # delete the file, ${del_file:0} expands to  the full file name
      # this is important for files with blanks in their names
      git rm "${del_file:0}" 2> /dev/null|| git rm $del_file_S 2> /dev/null

# this line does only work on non-possix shells
done < <($git_status_file)

This actually does work with my etckeeper-ng module where i solved the problem this way. hope that this helped.