Git add all subdirectories

Question

I'm having trouble adding a folder and all of it's subdirectories to my git repository. I realized this is a very popular question after doing some googling and I've tried each suggestion with no luck, specifically the suggestion from the man page on git-add. I even tried git add -A with no success. For simplicity sake, say I initialized my git repository as Dir1. Then I have the following directory structure of files.

Dir1/file1-1.txt Dir1/file1-2.txt Dir1/Dir2/file2-1.txt Dir1/Dir2/Dir3/file3-1.txt 

My real files have subdirectories that span 5-6 levels deep, so is there a git command to add all the files in each subdirectory to my repository? Right now, when I do the suggestion from the man page git add Dir1/\* I can see Dir2 in my repo, but it shows up as a green folder and I can't open it, which leads me to believe that all the files/folders in Dir2 did not get added. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm a new git user (less than a week of using it), so try and keep your instructions at a beginner's level.

Answer 1

Do,

git add . 

while in the root of the repository. It will add everything. If you do git add *, it will only add the files * points to. The single dot refers to the directory.

If your directory or file wasn't added to git index/repo after the above command, remember to check if it's marked as ignored by git in .gitignore file.

Answer 2

Simple solution:

git rm --cached directory git add directory