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
Moving to an existing branch
If you want to move your commits to an existing branch, it will look like this:
You can store uncommitted edits to your stash before doing this, using
git stash
. Once complete, you can retrieve the stashed uncommitted edits withgit stash pop
Moving to a new branch
WARNING: This method works because you are creating a new branch with the first command:
git branch newbranch
. If you want to move commits to an existing branch you need to merge your changes into the existing branch before executinggit reset --hard HEAD~3
(see Moving to an existing branch above). If you don't merge your changes first, they will be lost.Unless there are other circumstances involved, this can be easily done by branching and rolling back.
But do make sure how many commits to go back. Alternatively, you can instead of
HEAD~3
, simply provide the hash of the commit (or the reference like origin/master) you want to "revert back to" on the master (/current) branch, e.g:*1 You will only be "losing" commits from the master branch, but don't worry, you'll have those commits in newbranch!
WARNING: With Git version 2.0 and later, if you later
git rebase
the new branch upon the original (master
) branch, you may need an explicit--no-fork-point
option during the rebase to avoid losing the carried-over commits. Havingbranch.autosetuprebase always
set makes this more likely. See John Mellor's answer for details.