what is the purpose of dollar-sign in a git remove statement

Question

I have been looking for way to remove all of the deleted files (which I have deleted in my local file system) from my git repository. The command that I found is this:

git rm $(git ls-files -d)

This is the first time that I have seen $(...) in a git command. What does the $(...) do within this command?

Answer 1

It's shell syntax, not part of git. The enclosed command is run, and the resulting output is used as the argument(s) for the primary command. That is, if git ls-files -d outputs foo.txt and bar.txt, your command is equivalent to

git rm foo.txt bar.txt