Quickly remove all files from a git repository

Question

In a repository I have there are lots of unnecessary files, which I would like to remove from the repo and only keep locally. I understand that this is done by:

git rm --cached a_file

... or with -r in case it's a folder.

Now, it's easier to remove everything and add the few files I need. If I use * , git rightly complains when it's given files that are not in the repo, but in the same local folder.

How should I proceed?

EDIT: Using the -f flag won't work either:

$ git rm --cached -fr *
fatal: pathspec 'somefile' did not match any files

Answer 1

The --ignore-unmatch flag for git rm does exactly what you want from what I can tell.

$ git rm --cached bla
fatal: pathspec 'bla' did not match any files
$ git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch bla
$