How to remove reference of file Xcode?

In my case, adding and removing the external frameworks and using Clean did not solve the problem. Going to Target > Build Settings > Search paths and removing the offending paths from Framework Search Paths and Library Search Paths did the trick.

I hit the same issue today. Due to git merge issue, I ended up with a image file removed, but reference to it still exists. To clarify, My intention was to remove the image.

The simple way to fix this would be using vim, or other text editors

vim PATH_TO_PROJECT/{#projectName}.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj

and do a search on the name of the file you deleted and just delete all search results there.

After removing a subproject, the framework was always referenced in my code. To remove this framework I had to do these steps:

• remove subproject (reference)
• clean project
• close xcode

• remove all derived and cached data with this script run in applescript tool :

  tell application "Terminal"
      do script "rm -frd ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/*" 
      do script "rm -frd ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.dt.Xcode/*"
  end tell
  

Since the reference to those files needed to be removed, I tried creating the files again under the same name as those that I had removed manually and deleted them again through Xcode and selected remove references from the pop up.