title: Can I "uninitialize" a git submodule?
body: <p>I'm developing for an embedded project that has the Linux source tree as a submodule. I'm currently working on a non-development machine, so I'll never build with this repository; it's just for reference.</p>
  
  <p>At one point I initialized the linux submodule (bringing in about 2.5GB of data), but now I want to reverse the process, leaving the linux submodule uninitialized in this repository. To be clear, I don't want to check in any changes to the submodule as far as Git is concerned; I just want my disk space back.</p>
  
  <p>How can I do this? I could delete the <code>./linux</code> and <code>.git/modules/linux</code> directories to get rid of all the unneeded data, but I suspect that will leave git righteously confused and annoyed.</p>