git rm - fatal pathspec did not match any files

Question

I  added over 9000 photos by accident to my project folder  And committed them  Then deleted them from disk  Committed    Now I try to push changes to git server  But it takes too long and tries to send 12 Gb of data    I checked files size on disk and see that really  git folder takes 12 Gb    How to delete photos from there  I tried git rm  but fails     git rm public photos fatal  pathspec  public photos  did not match any files   Because I allready deleted them from disk  but they are still in  git folder    I tried to add public photos to  gitignore   public photos    zip   But no result  Of course I could hard reset head to moment when I did not have so many junk photos in my project  But since that time i committed many times and made a lot changes in code

User · Accepted Answer

In your case  use git filter-branch instead of git rm   git rm will delete the files in the sense that they will not be tracked by git anymore  but that does not remove the old commit objects corresponding to those images  and so you will still be stuck with pushing the earlier commits which correspond to 12GB of images   The git filter-branch  on the other hand  can remove those files from all the previous commits as well  thus doing away with the need to push any of them    Use the command  git filter-branch --force --index-filter      git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch public photos      --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all  After the filter branch is complete  verify that no unintended file was lost  Now add a  gitignore rule   echo public photos  gt  gt   gitignore git add  gitignore  amp  amp  git commit -m  ignore rule for photos   Now do a push  git push -f origin branch    Check this  this and this for further help  Just to be on the safer side  I would suggest you create a backup copy of the repo on your system before going ahead with these instructions   As for your orignial error message  it is happening because you already untracked them using git rm  and hence git is complaining because it can t remove a file it isn t tracking  Read more about this here

User · Answer

git stash    did the job   It restored the files that I had deleted using rm instead of git rm   I did first a checkout of the last hash  but I do not believe it is required

User · Answer

I had a duplicate directory   web web  and it removed the nested duplicate when I ran rm -rf web while inside the first web folder

User · Answer

To remove the tracked and old committed file from git you can use the below command  Here in my case  I want to untrack and remove all the file from dist directory   git filter-branch --force --index-filter  git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch dist  --tag-name-filter cat -- --all   Then  you need to add it into your  gitignore so it won t be tracked further

User · Answer

A very simple answer is   Step 1    Firstly add your untracked files to which you want to delete    using git add   or git add  lt filename gt    Step 2    Then delete them easily using command git rm -f  lt filename gt  here rm remove and -f forcely

User · Answer

using this worked for me  git rm -f --cached  lt filename gt

User · Answer

This chains work in my case    git rm -r WebApplication packages   There was a confirmation git-dialog  You should choose  y  option    git commit -m  blabla  git push -f origin  lt ur branch gt

User · Answer

Step 1  Add the file name s  to your  gitignore file   Step 2  git filter-branch --force --index-filter        git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch YOURFILE        --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all   Step 3  git push -f origin branch   A big thank you to  mu

[git] git rm - fatal: pathspec did not match any files

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