Untrack files from git temporarily

Question

I have setup a local git on my machine  When I initialized git  I added pre-compiled libs and binaries  However  now during my development I don t want to check in those files intermittently  I dont want to remove these files from repo  Is there any way to not keep a track of these files till I complete my development   I think I can not use  gitignore as it works only for those files which are not in git  I want to temporarily disable tracking of files

User · Answer

I am assuming that you are asking how to remove ALL the files in the build folder or the bin folder, Rather than selecting each files separately.

You can use this command:

git rm -r -f /build\*

Make sure that you are in the parent directory of the build directory.
This command will, recursively "delete" all the files which are in the bin/ or build/ folders. By the word delete I mean that git will pretend that those files are "deleted" and those files will not be tracked. The git really marks those files to be in delete mode.

Do make sure that you have your .gitignore ready for upcoming commits.
Documentation : git rm

User · Answer

To remove all Untrack files  Try this terminal command   git clean -fdx

User · Answer

Use following command to untrack files  git rm --cached  lt file path gt

User · Answer

you could keep your files untracked after  git rm -r --cached  lt file gt    add your files with  git add -u   them push or do whatever you want

User · Answer

Not an answer to the original question  But this might help someone   To see the changes you have done  know which files are marked as --assume-unchanged   git ls-files -v   The resulted list of files will have a prefix with one character  ex   H or h  If it is a lowercase  i e  h  then the file was marked --assume-unchanged

User · Answer

An alternative to assume-unchanged is skip-worktree  The latter has a different meaning  something like  quot Git should not track this file  Developers can  and are encouraged  to make local changes  quot  In your situation where you do not wish to track changes to  typically large  build files  assume-unchanged is a good choice  In the situation where the file should have default contents and the developer is free to modify the file locally  but should not check their local changes back to the remote repo  skip-worktree is a better choice  Another elegant option is to have a default file in the repo  Say the filename is BuildConfig Default cfg  The developer is expected to rename this locally to BuildConfig cfg and they can make whatever local changes they need  Now add BuildConfig cfg to  gitignore so the file is untracked  See this question which has some nice background information in the accepted answer

User · Answer

The git-book mentions this in section 2 4   Undoing Things    Basically  what you have to do is reset the state of the index for some files back to the HEAD state  that is to the state of the latest checkout  or commit    This undoes staging the file to the current index   The command for this task is git reset  1   So  the command you have to execute is   git reset HEAD  path to file   The newer versions of git  I believe since 1 6 or so  gives this command  and many more  as a tip when executing git status   These versions are very user-friendly   A personal tip  if you are only staging a few files  use git add -i   This will launch the interactive staging tool  which makes thing particularly easy   Also  I highly recommend reading the book  as it is very explicit on the use of git in practical situations    1  http   www git-scm com book

User · Answer

git rm --cached   However  you shouldn t be committing compiled binaries and external dependancies in the first place   Use a tool like Bundler to pull those in instead

User · Answer

git update-index should do what you want  This will tell git you want to start ignoring the changes to the file git update-index --assume-unchanged path to file  When you want to start keeping track again git update-index --no-assume-unchanged path to file  Github Documentation  update-index

[git] Untrack files from git temporarily

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