Why use 'git rm' to remove a file instead of 'rm'?
Removing files using rm
is not a problem per se, but if you then want to commit that the file was removed, you will have to do a git rm
anyway, so you might as well do it that way right off the bat.
Also, depending on your shell, doing git rm
after having deleted the file, you will not get tab-completion so you'll have to spell out the path yourself, whereas if you git rm
while the file still exists, tab completion will work as normal.
If you just use rm
, you will need to follow it up with git add <fileRemoved>
. git rm
does this in one step.
You can also use git rm --cached
which will remove the file from the index (staging it for deletion on the next commit), but keep your copy in the local file system.