In this short article we will cover – How to delete untracked files from current working tree in Github ?
To delete untracked file use git-clean command which helps to Remove untracked files from the working tree.
Step by Step
Step 1: Do quick check to ensure only files that you dont need get deleted not not the once you need. Run git clean -n to check exactly which files are untracked at the moment, it wont delete any thing yet.
Step 2: Once happy with your selection use git clean -f command to delete.
- To remove directories, run
git clean -f -dorgit clean -fd - To remove ignored files, run
git clean -f -Xorgit clean -fX - To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run
git clean -f -xorgit clean -fx
Step 3: Run git status command to check if the files actually got deleted.
Additional commands that you would like –
-d
- Use
git clean -d - To Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.
- -f
- Use
git clean -f
- –force
- If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to delete files or directories unless given -f, -n or -i. Git will refuse to delete directories with .git sub directory or file unless a second -f is given.
- -i
- Use
git clean -i
- –interactive
- To Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See “Interactive mode” for details.
- -n
- Use
git clean -n
- –dry-run
- To check what will be deleted. But, doesn’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.
- -q
- Use
git clean -q
- –quiet
- Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are successfully removed.
- -e <pattern>
- Use
git clean -e
- –exclude=<pattern>
- In addition to those found in .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, also consider these patterns to be in the set of the ignore rules in effect.
- -x
- Use
git clean -x - Don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, but do still use the ignore rules given with -e options.
- This command allows removing all untracked files, including build products. This can be used (possibly in conjunction with git reset) to create a pristine working directory to test a clean build.
- -X
- Use
git clean -X - Only removes files that have been ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.
