[RFC] Removing deleted files after checkout

Hello,

I recently started using git to revision control the source for my web-page. I wrote a post-update hook to checkout the files when I push to the 'live' repository.

In this particular context I decided that it was important to me to remove deleted files after checking out the new HEAD. I accomplished this by running git-ls-files before and after the checkout.

Is there a better way? Could there be some way built into git to easily find out what files dissappear when replacing the current index with one from a new tree? Is there already? The behavior of git should NOT change to delete these files but I would argue that some way should exist to query what files disappeared if removing them is desired.

Here is some code that I wrote for this. It feels a bit hackish to me but I couldn't think of anything better. Comments and criticism are welcome.

#!/bin/sh

# HEAD changed so checkout the new HEAD deleted any files that should no longer # be around. oldlist=$(tempfile) newlist=$(tempfile) removedlist=$(tempfile)

git-ls-files | sort -r > $oldlist git-checkout-script -f git-ls-files | sort -r > $newlist

diff -u $oldlist $newlist |
  tail -n +4 |
  sed -n 's/^-//p' > $removedlist

# Remove each file cat $removedlist | xargs -rl rm -f # Remove the directories if empty cat $removedlist | xargs -rl dirname | xargs -rl rmdir -p --ignore-fail-on-non-empty

rm -f $oldlist $newlist $removedlist

# --- snip ---

If you are interested I attached the full post-update hook script that I actually use to do this. Again, comments are welcome.

Thanks, Carl