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.
In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.
You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).
A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.
From the Git documentation for git pull:
In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.
Best Answer
A clean/smudge filter is definitely not the place for reliably adding commit based information into a work tree file. The reason - as you've discovered - is that the file won't be touched in operations that don't have to write a new version of the file into the work tree. You can merge or fast-forward many commits without the filter being applied if the given file hasn't been touched by those commits.
You would probably be better off with a template file that can be transformed to an ignored real file with embedded commit information by a build step which uses something like
git rev-parse HEADorgit describeto retrieve the current commit information.