Recursive git update-index --assume-unchanged

Question

I'm trying to run the following:

git update-index --assume-unchanged myFolderToIgnore 

Where myFolderToIgnore is a folder. However it fails saying its "unable to mark" it.

So I tried:

git update-index --assume-unchanged myFolderToIgnore/ 

Which GIT responds to with Ignoring path myFolderToIgnore/ but doesn't do anything (it still sees my changes and tries to check them in).

In the end I had to go in and manually mark each individual file as unchanged. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

update-index is an internal plumbing command and thus not as comfortable as the real front-end commands. You will have to handle the recursion bit yourself:

git ls-files -z myFolderToIgnore/ | xargs -0 git update-index --assume-unchanged 

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PSA: There is a high chance that assume-unchanged is not what you are looking for and you should use skip-worktree instead. See here for more info.

Answer 2

I ran into this issue where my folder had hundreds of thousands of files, and thousands of folders.

This resulted in "Argument list too long".

The following solution will run the command for each folder and traverse the contents in those folders. So as long as your hundreds of thousands of files are separated in folders then this will work.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type d \( ! -name . \) -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && pwd && git ls-files -z ${pwd} | xargs -0 git update-index --assume-unchanged" \;