git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree
Synopsis
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>…
Description
Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.
Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.
If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are affected.
Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:
# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d
Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:
# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f
- To remove directories, run
git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
- To remove ignored files, run
git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
- To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run
git clean -f -x or git clean -fx
Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.
If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.
Again see the git-clean docs for more information.
Options
-f, --force
If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to
false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.
-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 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
Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild
everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.
-n, --dry-run
Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.
-d
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.
You can undo git add before commit with
git reset <file>
which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.
You can use
git reset
without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.
In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:
"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when
you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you
an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
Documentation: git reset
Best Answer
To stash your working directory including untracked files (especially those that are in the
.gitignore) then you probably want to use this cmd:Alternatively, you can use the shorthand
-uinstead of--include-untracked, or simplygit stash --allwhich stashes all files, including untracked and ignored files. This bahaviour changed in 2018, so make sure your git is up to date.Warning: there seems to be (or have been) situations in which contents of ignored directories could be deleted permanently. See this archived website for more information.