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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Can I remove a git repo without resorting to rm -rf ? (self.linux)

submitted 5 months ago by Buttons to c/[email protected]

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Git repos have lots of write protected files in the .git directory, sometimes hundreds, and the default rm my_project_managed_by_git will prompt before deleting each write protected file. So, to actually delete my project I have to do rm -rf my_project_managed_by_git.

Using rm -rf scares me. Is there a reasonable way to delete git repos without it?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If you're scared to do rm -rf, do something else that lets you inspect the entire batch of deletions first. Such as:

find .git ! -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 echo rm -fv

This will print out all the rm -fv commands that would be run. It's basically rm -rf --dry-run, but rm doesn't have that common option. Once you've verified that that's what you want to do, run it again without echo to do the actual deletion. If you're scared of having that in your history, either use a full path for .git, or prepend a space to the non-echo version of the command to make it avoid showing up in your shell history (assuming you have ignorespace in your HISTCONTROL env var)

I use this xargs echo pattern a lot when I'm crafting commands that are potentially destructive or change lots of things.