SHELL

Ignore files that have already been committed to Git

If you need to stop tracking a lot of ignored files, you can combine some commands:

git ls-files -i --exclude-standard | xargs -L1 git rm --cached

This would stop tracking the ignored files. If you want to actually remove files from filesystem, do not use the --cached option. You can also specify a folder to limit the search, such as:

git ls-files -i --exclude-standard -- ${FOLDER} | xargs -L1 git rm

Ignore files that have already been committed to a Git repository

git rm -r --cached .
git add .