git rm - fatal: pathspec did not match any files

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.

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最佳答案

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.

  1. Use the command

    git filter-branch --force --index-filter \
'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch public/photos' \
--prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

  2. After the filter branch is complete, verify that no unintended file was lost.

  3. Now add a .gitignore rule 

    echo public/photos >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore && git commit -m "ignore rule for photos"

  4. 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.

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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.

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A very simple answer is.

Step 1:

Firstly add your untracked files to which you want to delete:

using git add . or git add <filename>.

Step 2:

Then delete them easily using command git rm -f <filename> here rm=remove and -f=forcely.

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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.

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This chains work in my case:

  1. git rm -r WebApplication/packages

There was a confirmation git-dialog. You should choose "y" option.

  1. git commit -m "blabla"
  2. git push -f origin <ur_branch>
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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.

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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.

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using this worked for me

git rm -f --cached <filename>
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Just for reference, I noticed that I had some files with permissions 000, maybe they were created with sudo , I don't know, but after changing your permissions to 644 (I needed sudo for this operation), the problem was solved

sudo chmod 644 vendor/symfony/yaml

and the commit result :

diff --git a/vendor/symfony/yaml b/vendor/symfony/yaml
deleted file mode 160000
index 212a27b7..00000000
--- a/vendor/symfony/yaml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
-Subproject commit 212a27b731e5bfb735679d1ffaac82bd6a1dc996
diff --git a/vendor/symfony/yaml b/vendor/symfony/yaml
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..20a0b9d0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/vendor/symfony/yaml
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Subproject commit 212a27b731e5bfb735679d1ffaac82bd6a1dc996
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Sometimes it's happens when you are not tracking your file add your file with git add untracked file name, after this simply do git rm -r file name

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I got the same error while I wanted to delete cached node_modules dir.

instead of
git rm -r -f --cached node_modules I had to use
git rm -r -f --cached **/node_modules, because the dir was not part of the root dir.


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