1. The problem
2. Delete and forget unwanted committed files

#The problem

Anybody that has been using Git for a longer period of time, stumbles every now and then on this pesky little problem: tracked files in your Git repository that should have been ignored from te start. But now they are added, Git can't seem to "forget" about them.

I know I have faced this one a bunch of times! And here's how you can fix this issue and make you feel all clean and happy about your repository again.

#Delete and forget unwanted committed files

In this example we have the common situation where you've forgot to add .DS_Store to your global or repositories .gitignore file on your Mac (for Windows users there is a different but evenly annoying Thumbs.db that gets created now and then).

find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch

What does this command do?

1. First it deletes every file that matches .DS_Store;
2. Then it pipes these files to the git rm command that makes sure Git doesn't keep tracking these files.

Without removing the traces of these files in Git, the .DS_Store files that were tracked will eventually pop up again in your working copy.