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

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 9, 2017, 17:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20171009175225.qn6a3j2th3dxjjn2@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20171008204227.f6wgaobosa6yn62g@thunk.org>

On Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 04:42:27PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> On Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 03:44:14PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > >
> > >     find <find args> | xargs git rm
> > >
> > > myself.
> > 
> >   that's what i would have normally used until i learned about git's
> > magical globbing capabilities, and i'm going to go back to using it,
> > because git's magical globbing capabilities now scare me.
> 
> Hmm, I wonder if the reason why git's magically globbing capabilities
> even exist at all is for those poor benighted souls on Windows, for
> which their shell (and associated utilities) doesn't have advanced
> tools like "find" and "xargs"....

One benefit of globbing with Git is that it restricts the matches only to tracked files. That matters a lot when you have a very broad glob (e.g., like you might use with "git grep") because it avoids looking at cruft like generated files (or even inside .git).

-Peff