Delete unecessary .keep files

Question

I noticed my git repository has a lot of .keep files. They were once useful when their parent directories were otherwise empty, but since then a lot of the directories now have real children that keep them alive in git.

Is there a nice way to remove all unneeded .keep files? Particularly, those that:

1. Have 0 size (no real content)
2. Have precisely the name .keep
3. Have neighbors in their folders (i.e. their deletion wouldn't lead to their parent folders becoming empty)

I looked at the docs of git gc, git clean, etc. but I didn't find such a feature.

Gilda

Answer 1

Late to the party but you could run something like this which doesn't use git for tracked files but goes through all the directories:

find . -type d -exec sh -c '[[ $(ls -1A {} | wc -l) -gt 1 ]] && [ ! -s {}/.keep ] && rm -f {}/.keep' \;

find . -type d -exec sh -c '...' \;: Find all directories (recursive operation by default) and run the following shell command for that directory.

[[ $(ls -1A {} | wc -l) -gt 1 ]] && [ ! -s {}/.keep ] && rm {}/.keep': Run through each of the dirs and see if there are more than one files+directories located in them. If that is the case AND the file is empty, then delete .keep.

Thrush

Answer 2

Git does not have any mention on what a keep file is, so its name is just a convention (.gitkeep, .keep, etc). This is why git-clean is does not support anything like that. I can't think of an extremely easy of doing that, so I ended up with a small script like this:

#!/bin/bash

# read all directories without escaping
while IFS= read -r DIR; do
    # enter to each directory to simplify parsing
    pushd "$DIR" 1> /dev/null
    # ask git to list all tracked files in the current directory
    #   filtering out the .keep file (the inVerted -v grep switch)
    #   and checking if it is giving more than 1 line
    if [[ $(git ls-files | grep -Pv '^.keep$' | head -1) ]]; then
        # if true, just print out the directory along with its "keep" file
        echo "$DIR/.keep"
    fi
    popd 1> /dev/null
    # the -mindepth would enable the depth-first traversing
    #   (empty files only named .keep and never walk into .git directories -- print out directories only)
done < <(find -mindepth 1 -not -path '*/\.git/*' -type f -name '.keep' -empty -printf '%h\n')

This script would print out all redundant .keep files in dry run. If the generated like looks fine, pipe it with xargs: above_script_path | xargs git rm

Encratis

Answer 3

As you can read from Random 'concerns' folders and '.keep' files .keep files are just useful files to allow folders to be "committed" to a repository.

Here's a command to remove all .keep files. Then just commit that as you want afterwards.

zrrbite@ZRRBITE MINGW64 /d/dev/git/keeptest (master) 
$ git ls-files *.keep | xargs git rm                          
rm '.keep' 
rm 'test/.keep'
                                                         
zrrbite@ZRRBITE MINGW64 /d/dev/git/keeptest (master) 
$ git st                                                     
## master                                                    
D  .keep
D  test/.keep                                                 

Matrices

I wasn't trying to delete them all, I wanted to delete only those that would not cause the deletion (roughly speaking, because git doesn't track folders) of their parent folder – Gilda

Ah. I thought you only had .keep files in folders that were empty, otherwise. This way, you could remove them all and be safe. The other .keep files are redundant (since the folders are not empty) and could be added when needed. I think this is a cleaner approach (to not have .keep files in non-empty-folders). It sounds like you might just want to remove all .keep files because you don't want to "keep" empty folders. – Matrices

It's a big repo, with lots of contributors. I don't know their motivation behind wanting to keep certain folders for future use, and I don't want to take that away from them. However, I can be sure that .keep files in otherwise non-empty files are certainly useless, and feel comfortable removing them. – Gilda