Remove all git files from a directory?

Question

I have a folder under version control. I want to make a copy of it to send around, but don't want to include all the .git directories and the files underneath it.

Is there a way to remove all the git files instead of manually deleting all of them?

Answer 1

How to remove all .git directories under a folder in Linux.

Run this find command, it will list all .git directories under the current folder:

find . -type d -name ".git" \
&& find . -name ".gitignore" \
&& find . -name ".gitmodules"

Prints:

./.git
./.gitmodules
./foobar/.git
./footbar2/.git
./footbar2/.gitignore

There should only be like 3 or 4 .git directories because git only has one .git folder for every project. You can rm -rf yourpath each of the above by hand.

If you feel like removing them all in one command and living dangerously:

//Retrieve all the files named ".git" and pump them into 'rm -rf'
//WARNING if you don't understand why/how this command works, DO NOT run it!

( find . -type d -name ".git" \
  && find . -name ".gitignore" \
  && find . -name ".gitmodules" ) | xargs rm -rf

//WARNING, if you accidentally pipe a `.` or `/` or other wildcard
//into xargs rm -rf, then the next question you will have is: "why is
//the bash ls command not found?  Requiring an OS reinstall.

Answer 2

The .git folder is only stored in the root directory of the repo, not all the sub-directories like subversion. You should be able to just delete that one folder, unless you are using Submodules...then they will have one too.

Answer 3

cd to the repository then

find . -name ".git*" -exec rm -R {} \;

Make sure not to accidentally pipe a single dot, slash, asterisk, or other regex wildcard into find, or else rm will happily delete it.

Answer 4

You can use git-archive, for example:

git archive master | bzip2 > project.tar.bz2

Where master is the desired branch.

Answer 5

In case someone else stumbles onto this topic - here's a more "one size fits all" solution.

If you are using .git or .svn, you can use the --exclude-vcs option for tar. This will ignore many different files/folders required by different version control systems.

If you want to read more about it, check out: http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/exclude.html

Answer 6

ls | xargs find 2>/dev/null | egrep /\.git$ | xargs rm -rf

This command (and it is just one command) will recursively remove .git directories (and files) that are in a directory without deleting the top-level git repo, which is handy if you want to commit all of your files without managing any submodules.

find 2>/dev/null | egrep /\.git$ | xargs rm -rf

This command will do the same thing, but will also delete the .git folder from the top-level directory.

Answer 7

Unlike other source control systems like SVN or CVS, git stores all of its metadata in a single directory, rather than in every subdirectory of the project. So just delete .git from the root (or use a script like git-export) and you should be fine.

Answer 8

With PowerShell

Get-ChildItem -Path .\path\to\folder -Filter ".git" -Recurse -Attributes "H" | Remove-Item -Force

More explanation:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/56369640/6710876
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-childitem?view=powershell-7.2#parameters

Answer 9

sudo find -name .git -exec rm -fr {} ;