Resync git repo with new gitignore file

Question

Is it possible to  refresh  a git repository after updating the gitignore file   I just added more ignorations    to my gitignore and would like to remove stuff already in the repo matching the new file

User · Answer

I might misunderstand  but are you trying to delete files newly ignored or do you want to ignore new modifications to these files   In this case  the thing is working   If you want to delete ignored files previously commited  then use  git rm    cached  git ls-files -i    exclude-standard  git commit -m  clean up

User · Answer

I know this is an old question  but gracchus s solution doesn t work if file names contain spaces   VonC s solution to file names with spaces is to not remove them utilizing --ignore-unmatch  then remove them manually  but this will not work well if there are a lot   Here is a solution that utilizes bash arrays to capture all files     Build bash array of the file names while read -r file  do      rmlist      file    done  lt   lt  git ls-files -i --exclude-standard   git rm    -cached    rmlist       git commit -m  ignore update

User · Answer

The solution mentioned in  quot  gitignore file not ignoring quot  is a bit extreme  but should work    rm all files git rm -r --cached     add all files as per new  gitignore git add     now  commit for new  gitignore to apply git commit -m  quot  gitignore is now working quot    make sure to commit first your changes you want to keep  to avoid any incident as jball037 comments below  The --cached option will keep your files untouched on your disk though   You also have other more fine-grained solution in the blog post  quot Making Git ignore already-tracked files quot   git rm --cached  git ls-files -i --exclude-standard    Bassim suggests in his edit  Files with space in their paths  In case you get an error message like fatal  path spec       did not match any files  there might be files with spaces in their path  You can remove all other files with option --ignore-unmatch   git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch  git ls-files -i --exclude-standard    but unmatched files will remain in your repository and will have to be removed explicitly by enclosing their path with double quotes   git rm --cached  quot  lt path to remaining file gt  quot

[git] Resync git repo with new .gitignore file

Examples related to git