Staging Deleted files

Question

Say I have a file in my git repository called foo.

Suppose it has been deleted with rm (not git rm). Then git status will show:

Changes not staged for commit:      deleted: foo 

How do I stage this individual file deletion?

If I try:

git add foo 

It says:

'foo' did not match any files. 

Update (9 years later, lol):

This looks like it has been fixed in git 2.x:

$ git --version git version 2.25.1  $ mkdir repo  $ cd repo  $ git init . Initialized empty Git repository in repo/.git/  $ touch foo bar baz  $ git add foo bar baz  $ git commit -m "initial commit" [master (root-commit) 79c736b] initial commit 3 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 bar create mode 100644 baz create mode 100644 foo  $ rm foo  $ git status On branch master Changes not staged for commit:     deleted: foo  $ git add foo  $ git status On branch master Changes to be committed:     deleted:    foo 

Answer 1

Use git rm foo to stage the file for deletion. (This will also delete the file from the file system, if it hadn't been previously deleted. It can, of course, be restored from git, since it was previously checked in.)

To stage the file for deletion without deleting it from the file system, use git rm --cached foo

Answer 2

Even though it's correct to use git rm [FILE], alternatively, you could do git add -u.

According to the git-add documentation:

-u --update

Update the index just where it already has an entry matching [FILE]. This removes as well as modifies index entries to match the working tree, but adds no new files.

If no [FILE] is given when -u option is used, all tracked files in the entire working tree are updated (old versions of Git used to limit the update to the current directory and its subdirectories).

Upon which the index will be refreshed and files will be properly staged.