Sunday, February 12, 2017
Git rm may cause insanity
Git rm may cause insanity
Ran across this today, and wanted to help others avoid the same fate. If you use git rm to remove the last file in a directory, it will remove the directory as well. If you are in that directory, odd things can happen that will potentially drive you insane.
Lets create a git repository with a folder that has a single file in it:
$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo/
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/foo/.git/
$ mkdir bar
$ cd bar/
$ echo hello > splat.txt
$ git add splat.txt
$ git ci -m adding a text file
[master (root-commit) 069f11b] adding a text file
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 bar/splat.txt
So I now have a git repository and placed the file bar/splat.txt under revision control. Now if I do:
$ git rm splat.txt
rm bar/splat.txt
This will not only remove splat.txt, but it will remove the whole bar directory. I say this will drive you insane, because if you try to move or copy a file into your current directory, youll get an error that will probably catch you off guard. Like:
$ cp ~/.gitignore .
cp: ./.gitignore: No such file or directory
There is a file called .gitignore in my home directory, its just that my current directory no longer exists. It took me about five minutes to realize what was going on... and I was starting to wonder if I knew how to use the cp command.
The reason I ran into this is that I was rearranging my .vim folder to use pathogen. I keep all of my dot files under source control and stumbled upon this while clearing out my vim autoload folder.
Available link for download
