Different ways to commit untracked files in Git
This article discusses the different methods we can use to commit untracked files in Git. If you introduce new files in your project in Git, these files will fall under the category of untracked files.
With respect to the Git version control system, these files do not exist in your project. So, how do you commit these files?
Different ways to commit untracked files in Git
Let's start with the traditional approach.
To commit an untracked file, we will first instruct Git to start tracking the file. This is done by adding the file to the staging area using the git add command.
Let's say we have an untracked styles.css file. To track the file we would run:
$ git add styles.css
Simple, right? What if we have a hundred untracked files?
Adding the files one by one will take a lot of time. Instead, you can run .the command with as shown below.
$ git add .
This will add all untracked files to the index. The index is also called the staging area.
We can commit the files using the git commit command as shown below.
$ git commit -m "Adding new Files"
We use the -m flag to include the commit message. If you run git committhe command yourself, Git will open a text editor to provide you with the commit message.
Why not use the -m flag to make life easier?
How long will this take? Thirty seconds? A minute?
Fortunately, there are commands that can make it faster which brings us to the second method.
In the previous section, we used two commands, namely git addand git commit. As shown in the figure below, we can combine the two to make our work simpler and clearer.
$ git commit -a -m "Adding new Files"
This command will commit all files, tracked and untracked. How long did that take? Much faster, right?
You can commit untracked files using the git add and git commit commands separately, or combine the two by -aadding the -untracked flag to the git commit command. Whichever you choose, you'll arrive at the same destination.
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