git add -A is not adding all modified files in directories

Question

I want to add all files no matter what: whether it is deleted, created, modified, untracked, etc? I just don\'t want to git add ALL my files EVERY T

Answer 1

I just recreated this by accident.

I copied a project I had in another folder into my new git repo. I didn't intend to use it as a submodule, I intended to use it as a starting point for a new project. The project I copied which was now a subfolder of my main git repo had .git/ in it. Delete subfolder/.git/.

rm -rf subfolder/.git

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Then things were still weird...

git status

Nothing to commit. Hmm... What about all of these files?

The reason is the files are still cached in git as a submodule - this cache needs to be cleared of that:

git rm --cached subfolder

You should now see that all of the files in the subfolder in git status.

You can now commit and push.

git add -A
git commit -m 'fix: rm accidental submodule and readd files'
git push origin <branch>

Answer 2

I had this very issue the past couple of days with BitBucket. I am working on a project that is being tracked in its repository by Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition.

However I had used Git Bash on occasion to manually do commits and that's when things started to go wrong and files were simply being ignored. Tried to reclone the repo but this didn't help.

Finally I found that if you go into Visual Studio > Team Explorer > click on Sync, Visual Studio will do a pull and then commit and push any untracked files.

You could do the same manually through Git Bash if you like the console like I do.

Hope this helps someone.

Answer 3

I had a similar problem on Windows where I git add --all left some files untracked, problem was that there were several files with different casing 'test.php' and 'Test.php' so git tracked Test.php and not lowercase version of it.

This may help someone in future and save some head scratching.

Answer 4

I solved this by deleting the .git folders inside the supposed submodules and inside the project root, and then doing a new 'git init'

Answer 5

The problem here is that BankAccount, BuckysButtons, multiview, rotator and segmentedControls are all git submodules, which act like independent repositories in many ways.

If what you want to do is to run git add -A . in each submodule, you could do:

git submodule foreach --recursive git add -A .

And then you could create a commit in every submodule with:

git submodule foreach --recursive "git commit -m 'Committing in a submodule'"

(If you don't have other submodules nested inside those submodules, the --recursive option is unnecessary.)

However, I don't recommend doing this. You should carefully change into each submodule in turn, and consider how you want to update them, treating each as a standalone repository. Then only commit these new submodule versions in the main project when you have tested that the project as a whole works with those new versions of each submodule.

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Update: It seems from the error message that you've quoted in the comments below that you have added these other git repositories directly rather than as submodules. This can happen if you copy another git repository into your repository and then just use git add to stage it, rather than adding it with git submodule add <REPOSITORY-URL>. If you really intend these to be stored as submodules, I would suggest moving them out of your repository, committing their deletion, and then add them properly as submodules with git submodule add

Answer 6

I had this issue because I cloned somebody else's repository into my project. When I cloned it, there were already .git and .gitignore folders/files from their project. After deleting those pre-existing git files and starting over with git again, it works fine.