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No. Even with an existing . gitignore you are able to stage "ignored" files with the -f (force) flag. If they files are already commited, they don't get removed automatically.
If you want to ignore a file that you've committed in the past, you'll need to delete the file from your repository and then add a . gitignore rule for it. Using the --cached option with git rm means that the file will be deleted from your repository, but will remain in your working directory as an ignored file.
Normally yes, . gitignore is useful for everyone who wants to work with the repository. On occasion you'll want to ignore more private things (maybe you often create LOG or something. In those cases you probably don't want to force that on anyone else.
The process of cloning ignores the . gitignore file. If a file is added, committed and another commit with the . gitignore is created, the file will still be part of the repository and therefore cloned.
No you cannot force a file that is already committed in the repo to be removed just because it is added to the .gitignore
You have to git rm --cached to remove the files that you don't want in the repo. ( --cached since you probably want to keep the local copy but remove from the repo. ) So if you want to remove all the exe's from your repo do
git rm --cached /\*.exe
(Note that the asterisk * is quoted from the shell - this lets git, and not the shell, expand the pathnames of files and subdirectories)
If you have not pushed the changes already:
git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -m 'clear git cache'
git push
However, will it automatically remove these committed files from the repository?
No. Even with an existing .gitignore you are able to stage "ignored" files with the -f (force) flag. If they files are already commited, they don't get removed automatically.
git rm --cached path/to/ignored.exe
I had to remove .idea and target folders and after reading all comments this worked for me:
git rm -r .idea
git rm -r target
git commit -m 'removed .idea folder'
and then push to master
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