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I am learning Git and am unable to understand under what condition the -f flag is used while issuing the "git rm" command. Please explain a scenario where rm -f would be required instead of rm only?
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Git rm Overview The primary function of git rm is to remove tracked files from the Git index. Additionally, git rm can be used to remove files from both the staging index and the working directory. There is no option to remove a file from only the working directory.
If you want to remove a file from your Git repository, you must use git rm. This is because the git rm command executes instructions to remove a file from a Git repository. Not all files on a Linux system are in a Git repository, so the Linux rm command does not remove files from a Git repository.
Git rm vs rmThe git rm command removes the file from both the git repository and the local file system. The rm command, on the other hand, only removes the file from the file system.
By default, the git rm command deletes files both from the Git repository as well as the filesystem. Using the --cached flag, the actual file on disk will not be deleted.
The -f is used to remove a file if the file is not up to date with your last checked out commit. It is to prevent you from removing a file that you have made changes to, but have not yet checked them in.
You check out commit 0a12d4 that contains the file sample.txt. Before you change any files, you could remove the sample.txt with git rm sample.txt. However, once you make a change to sample.txt, you would need to use git rm -f sample.txt to remove the file
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