Re: "git rm" seems to do recursive removal even without "-r"

From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Oct 8, 2017, 18:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20171008184046.uj7gcutddli54ic3@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <1507473160.8322.12.camel@mad-scientist.net>

On Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 10:32:40AM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> Personally I don't use Git's magical globbing capabilities, and use "git
> rm" as if it were UNIX rm.  So in your request above I'd use:
> 
>    git rm $(find . -name Makefile)
> 
> which I find simpler.

I have to agree that git's magical globbing capabilities are... strange. (And apologies to Robert for my earlier post; I didn't understand what he was complaining about.) I don't use it either, although I tend to use:

    find <find args> | xargs git rm

myself.

One thing which is interesting is that not only is the git's magical globbing capabilities have somewhat unusual semantics, the how globbing is done in .gitignore entries are completely different.

Shrug. I put this in the same category as "tabs are significant in Makefile's", "whitespace is significant in python", and "the many varied different behaviours and uses of 'git reset'".

They are all idiosyncrancies of semantics of various highly popular tools (which being highly popular, would make changing the details quite difficult due to backwards compatibility concerns, even if we wanted to change them).

						- Ted