til/git/find-and-remove-files-that-match-a-name.md

Find And Remove Files That Match A Name

Let's say I have a bunch of robots.txt file scattered throughout my project. I want to find all instances of that file checked into git. I then want to remove that file from git.

I can find all the instances of that file checked into git using the git-ls-files command.

$ git ls-files '**/robots.txt'
project-a/public/robots.txt
project-b/public/robots.txt
apps/project-c/public/robots.txt

That results in a list of paths of those files regardless of how far down they are nested (because of the ** glob pattern).

And because git-ls-files is a git plumbing command, it pipes cleanly into other unix commands.

I can combine that first command with git rm using the xargs command.

$ git ls-files '**/robots.txt' | xargs git rm
rm 'project-a/public/robots.txt'
rm 'project-b/public/robots.txt'
rm 'apps/project-c/public/robots.txt'

That takes each path from the first part of the command and passes it to git rm which stages it as a removed file.

I can finalize my work by creating a commit from these staged changes.