Unable to remove fast many files in Git

Question

I removed 777 files which were in Git's branch newFeature by

rm !(example)

I would like to commit. Git ask me to manually remove each of the removed files by

git rm file

It would take a lot of time to write the above command for all 777 files which names are not similar.

How can I remove these 777 files in my Git branch newFeature? I want to keep them as a backup for later use, but now, I want to be without them.

Answer 1

Do you have a list of these files somewhere, or can you get them using git? If so, and if you're on a Unix box, use that list and xargs together to give the filenames to git rm.

Answer 2

git add -u

It will "git delete" all files you removed.

From Git add:

u
--update

Update only files that git already knows about, staging modified content for commit and marking deleted files for removal.
This is similar to what "git commit -a" does in preparation for making a commit, except that the update is limited to paths specified on the command line.
If no paths are specified, all tracked files in the current directory and its subdirectories are updated.

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The "plumbing way" was indeed some kind of script one-line

for i in ` git st | grep deleted | awk ‘{print $3}’ ` ; do git rm $i; done

or for Windows box with GnuWin32

git st | grep deleted | gawk "{print \"git rm \"$3}" | cmd

But git add -u is the main porcelain way to do it.