Why use git rm to remove a file instead of rm

Question

On SVN  removing something from the filesystem directly  rather than using svn  created a load of headaches   I haven t found this to be an issue when using git  but I notice that git has it s own rm implementation  git rm    What is the difference between rm and git rm

User · Answer

However  if you do end up using rm instead of git rm  You can skip the git add and directly commit the changes using   git commit -a

User · Answer

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    Here s how you might delete a file using rm -f and then remove it from your index with git rm    rm -f index html   git status -s  D index html   git rm index html rm  index html    git status -s D  index html   However you can do this all in one go with just git rm    git status -s   git rm index html rm  index html    ls lib vendor   git status -s D  index html

User · Answer

Adding to Andy s answer  there is additional utility to git rm    Safety  When doing git rm instead of rm  Git will block the removal if there is a discrepancy between the HEAD version of a file and the staging index or working tree version  This block is a safety mechanism to prevent removal of in-progress changes    Safeguarding  git rm --dry-run  This option is a safeguard that will execute the git rm command but not actually delete the files  Instead it will output which files it would have removed

User · Answer

Removing files using rm is not a problem per se  but if you then want to commit that the file was removed  you will have to do a git rm anyway  so you might as well do it that way right off the bat   Also  depending on your shell  doing git rm after having deleted the file  you will not get tab-completion so you ll have to spell out the path yourself  whereas if you git rm while the file still exists  tab completion will work as normal

User · Answer

If you just use rm  you will need to follow it up with git add  lt fileRemoved gt    git rm does this in one step   You can also use git rm --cached which will remove the file from the index  staging it for deletion on the next commit   but keep your copy in the local file system

User · Answer

When using git rm  the removal will part of your next commit  So if you want to push the change you should use git rm

User · Answer

git rm will remove the file from the index and working directory   only index if you used --cached   so that the deletion is staged for next commit

[git] Why use 'git rm' to remove a file instead of 'rm'?

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