Please CC me :) >From man git-rm: --cached Use this option to unstage and remove paths only from the index. Working tree files, whether modified or not, will be left alone. This wording is unclear and dangerous, and ought be cleaned up somehow. Probably also the option name should change. See here for examples of community self-help compensating for git-rm man page's particularly bad wording: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6919121/why-are-there-2-ways-to-unstage-a-file-in-git I suggest: - change "--cached" to "--cache" at the least (allow both) - probably deprecate --cached and add "--stage" to replace it - perhaps change the wording in the man page above to something similar as on the stackoverflow page above, e.g.: "Removes a file from the index. In the case where the file is already in the repo, git rm --cached will remove the file from the index, leaving it in the working directory and a commit will now remove it from the repo as well. Basically, after the commit, you would have unversioned the file and kept a local copy." or perhaps something like: "does not unstage a file, it actually stages the removal of the file(s) from the repo (assuming it was already committed before) but leaves the file in your working tree (leaving you with an untracked file)" The git "stage" is a primary concept, and a primary noun (one reason many of us have come to appreciate git), and git's cmd line options and help docs ought reflect this. Thanks, Zenaan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html