Remove and ignore all files that have an extension from a git repository

Question

I'm working on a django project with a few other developers and we have recently realized that all the .pwc files in our app cause the commits and repository to be cluttered.

Is there any way I can remove all .pwc files from all child directories in my git repository and then ignore them for any future commit?

Answer 1

Plenty of ways to remove them:

git ls-files | grep '\.pwc$' | xargs git rm

find . -name *.pwc | xargs git rm

Note: If you haven't committed them, just use rm, not git rm.

To ignore them in the future, simply add *.pwc to the .gitignore. (If you don't have one, create a file named .gitignore at the top level of your repository, and just add a single line saying "*.pwc")

Answer 2

Jefromi's answer will remove them for the present and the future...you could also remove them in the past using git filter-branch. Of course this has some other ramifications, like requiring everyone else working on the repo to re-checkout (and possibly rebase any work they haven't pushed to the main repo). Depends how big the PWC files are, you may want to do this if they are wasting a lot of diskspace in your repo (since every time you clone a git repo, you get every file and every revision)