4.4 Managing Files

Pragmatic Version Control — Pragmatic Programmers (37 / 103)

👈 4.3 Seeing What Has Changed | TOC | Chapter 5 Understanding and Using Branches 👉

Now your repository is starting to come together. With one file, it’s pretty simple right now, but as it grows, some cleanup is necessary.

Files need moving, code needs to be copied around, and some of the everyday cruft from working with your project needs to be ignored.

We all write flawless, bug-free code on our first pass. Right? Even though we would like to think that we do, we sometimes get things wrong. Naming a file incorrectly or putting it in the wrong directory is no exception.

You can move a file in Git by typing git mv <original-file> <new-file>. The command tells Git to create new-file with the existing file’s content, and it keeps the history and removes original-filename.

Your “Hello World” page is not an index, so let’s move it:

git mv is a convenience. Git can detect the movement of a file, but more steps are involved. You have to move the file and then call git add on the new file and git rm—the command to remove a file from the repository—on the old file.

Go ahead and commit the new hello.html move:

Now that you’ve renamed the index.html file, let’s talk about copying files.

If you’re used to Subversion, you might find it odd that Git doesn’t have a git cp command for copying. There’s a reason—Git doesn’t need it.

Subversion’s copy is mainly to let you create branches and tags — Git provides you with the commands to handle both of those directly. Git does track copied code, though.

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