Git commit showing untracked files in different directory altogether

Question

First post in here for me. Usually decent at figuring out git issues but this one really has me stumped.

I put the git remote of a directory into a new directory. I then went to the original directory I had the repo cloned into and removed the origin remote. This was because I was going to add express to a package.json through doing "git init", followed the prompts ("version", "desription", etc.) and when I got to "entry point" I meant to make a new file called app.js to put it all in, but typed script.js instead, which was the js file I'd been working with prior.

I wasn't and am still not sure how to switch that manually so I went ahead and removed the git remote, copied everything from the directory minus the new package.json and pasted it into the new directory so I can start over and make a new git init here.

I went and did the new git init in the new directory, creating the new package.json, then attempted to push it to the Github repo from the folder with the new remote in it, it said:

On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

then began listing every folder in the parent directory which contains the folder I was in and trying to push from. None of these should be tracked in this repo.

My normal process is just git add git commit -m "package.json" git push

But since I put the git remote in this folder, it wants me to do git push master, which I did, which then said that I needed to do git push --set upstream branch master, which ended up working and pushing the code. Github told me the compare & pull request was ready, so I clicked that and it now says "There isn't anything to compare." So I can't merge it.

After close to 5 billion different Google searches I found that making a .gitignore with ../ in it might work. That's the only way I got it to push in the first place. But now it is not recognizing the .gitignore and is back to displaying all these untracked files that are actually just other folders in the parent directory.

Not sure what to do, I hope my explanation is understandable. As you can imagine my brain feels like a fried egg at this point but I'm still down to keep trying until it's fixed.

Also tried "git clean" with various entries such as -c, -i, -fd, in both this newer directory and the parent one. Pretty sure I deleted a bunch of important stuff on accident but it (may have been) worth a try.

Any help is greatly appreciated!! You're all my heroes

Answer 1

I assume it's because the .gitignore itself don't remove the files/folders you have got in the repository and you have to remove them with :

git rm -r --cached

After that you can execute git status command to see outputs the files marked for deletion.