how to remove untracked files in Git

Question

I m working on a branch  say  experimental  branch which I branch out from my master branch Then  I generate a user model in experimental branch  but does not add them to index yet   What do I have to do if I want to discard all the changes of the files recently added in my experimental branch  The untracked files are listed as below     git status  On branch new chick  Untracked files      use  git add  lt file gt      to include in what will be committed           project        app models user rb        db migrate         test fixtures users yml        test unit user test rb   I tried to run  git reset --hard  in hope to undo all those changes  but all the files above still show   Anyone please shed some light on me

User · Answer

Well  I had the similar issue  I had taken latest but there were some changes in the local due to which the merge was not happening to a particular file  The file was untracked and I did not want them so  What I did was -     git checkout filepath filename  filepath - The location from where I did the git bash  then when I took the latest the changes were available

User · Answer

The command for your rescue is git clean

User · Answer

User interactive approach       git clean -i -fd  Remove  classpath  y N   N Remove  gitignore  y N   N Remove  project  y N   N Remove  settings   y N   N Remove src com amazon arsdumpgenerator inspector   y N   y Remove src com amazon arsdumpgenerator manifest   y N   y Remove src com amazon arsdumpgenerator s3   y N   y Remove tst com amazon arsdumpgenerator manifest   y N   y Remove tst com amazon arsdumpgenerator s3   y N   y   -i for interactive -f for force -d for directory -x for ignored files add if required  Note  Add -n or --dry-run to just check what it will do

User · Answer

While git clean works well  I still find it useful to use my own script to clean the git repo  it has some advantages   This shows a list of files to be cleaned  then interactively prompts to clean or not  This is nearly always what I want since interactively prompting per file gets tedious   It also allows manual filtering of the list which comes in handy when there are file types you don t want to clean  and have reason not to commit      git clean sh       bin bash readarray -t -d    FILES  lt   lt       git ls-files -z --other --directory           grep --null-data --null -v   bin   Cargo lock     if     FILES          then     echo   Nothing to clean       exit 0 fi  echo  Dirty files   printf     s n     FILES       DO REMOVE 0 while true  do     echo        read -p  Remove    FILES     files   y n     choice     case   choice  in         y Y               DO REMOVE 1             break            n N               echo  Exiting               break                echo  Invalid input  expected  Y y N n               continue        esac done  if     DO REMOVE  -eq 1   then     echo  Removing       for f in    FILES       do        rm -rfv   f      done fi

User · Answer

For deleting untracked files   git clean -f  For deleting untracked directories as well  use   git clean -f -d  For preventing any cardiac arrest  use  git clean -n -f -d

User · Answer

You may also return to the previous state of the local repo in another way    Add the untracked files to the staging area with git add   return to the previous state of the local repo with git reset --hard

User · Answer

To remove untracked files   directories do  git clean -fdx  -f - force -d - directories too -x - remove ignored files too   don t use this if you don t want to remove ignored files   Use with Caution  These commands can permanently delete arbitrary files  that you havn t thought of at first  Please double check and read all the comments below this answer and the --help section  etc   so to know all details to fine-tune your commands and surely get the expected result

User · Answer

Those are untracked files  This means git isn t tracking them  It s only listing them because they re not in the git ignore file  Since they re not being tracked by git  git reset won t touch them   If you want to blow away all untracked files  the simplest way is git clean -f  use git clean -n instead if you want to see what it would destroy without actually deleting anything   Otherwise  you can just delete the files you don t want by hand

[git] how to remove untracked files in Git?

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