How to remove untracked files git
How to remove untracked files git
How to remove untracked files git
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Check your version of git by running
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.
If any optional
. arguments are given, only those paths are affected.
OPTIONS
Normally, when no
Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See “Interactive mode” for details.
Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.
Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are successfully removed.
Use the given exclude pattern in addition to the standard ignore rules (see gitignore[5]).
Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.
Interactive mode
When the command enters the interactive mode, it shows the files and directories to be cleaned, and goes into its interactive command loop.
The command loop shows the list of subcommands available, and gives a prompt «What now> «. In general, when the prompt ends with a single >, you can pick only one of the choices given and type return, like this:
You also could say c or clean above as long as the choice is unique.
The main command loop has 6 subcommands.
Start cleaning files and directories, and then quit.
filter by pattern
This shows the files and directories to be deleted and issues an «Input ignore patterns>>» prompt. You can input space-separated patterns to exclude files and directories from deletion. E.g. «*.c *.h» will excludes files end with «.c» and «.h» from deletion. When you are satisfied with the filtered result, press ENTER (empty) back to the main menu.
select by numbers
This shows the files and directories to be deleted and issues an «Select items to delete>>» prompt. When the prompt ends with double >> like this, you can make more than one selection, concatenated with whitespace or comma. Also you can say ranges. E.g. «2-5 7,9» to choose 2,3,4,5,7,9 from the list. If the second number in a range is omitted, all remaining items are selected. E.g. «7-» to choose 7,8,9 from the list. You can say * to choose everything. Also when you are satisfied with the filtered result, press ENTER (empty) back to the main menu.
This will start to clean, and you must confirm one by one in order to delete items. Please note that this action is not as efficient as the above two actions.
How to Properly Remove Untracked Files With Git
October 05, 2021
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When you’re versioning your project with Git, you’ll have files transitioning between several different states. One of those is when a file is untracked—that is to say, Git can “see” a new file there but isn’t actively versioning it. You’ll often need to remove untracked files, so how do you go about it?
This is what this post is all about: learning how to remove those files. We’ll start by defining in more detail what untracked files are and why you’d want to get rid of them. After that, you’ll get your hands dirty learning how to do it in practice.
If you read any of our Git tutorials, you know how it goes: We expect you to be familiar with some basic Git commands and be comfortable working with the command line.
With that out of the way, let’s get started.
What Are Untracked Files?
Untracked files are the ones still not versioned—”tracked”—by Git. This is the state of new files you add to your repository.
That basically means Git is aware the file exists, but still hasn’t saved it in its internal database. That has an important implication: If you lose the information from an untracked file, it’s typically gone for good. Git can’t recover it since it didn’t store it in the first place.
Why Remove Untracked Files?
When it comes to untracked files, the typical course of action would be to track them—using the command git add—so you can commit them, saving them inside your repo’s history.
Why would you want to remove untracked files? You might have files added accidentally to the project’s folder or automatically generated assets that aren’t supposed to be versioned, to name just two possible scenarios.
It’s important to emphasize that untracked files do no harm; you could just leave them where they are. However, removing them makes your working directory cleaner and more organized.
Finally, you often have files that need to be present inside your repository folder but that you shouldn’t version. Build artifacts and individual configuration files are two classic examples. For those cases, you shouldn’t remove the files but ignore them. More on that later.
Git Remove Untracked Files: How?
With the “what” and the “why” out of the way, it’s time for the “how.”
The first approach to delete untracked files is simply to delete them. This has basically the same effect as the correct approach you’ll read about soon. However, this can get tedious pretty quickly if you have a lot of files, or if they’re spread across different hierarchical levels within the project’s file structure.
The proper solution is to use the command git clean.
Git Clean to the Rescue
Git clean is a somewhat lesser-known git command. You can use it to clean all untracked files at once.
As a default, you need to specify a parameter; otherwise, you’ll get an error message. We’ll now walk you through the main parameters and provide examples.
Start by creating a repository. We’ll use the same repo through the examples.
mkdir untracked-files-tutorial
cd untracked-files-tutorial
git init
The -f parameter is for force. It forces the deletion of the files. Let’s see an example.
In the same repo you’ve just created, create a new file:
echo hello > file.txt
Now, if you run git status, you’ll see a result like this:
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use «git add» to track)
Git tells us the file is untracked and even instructs us how to include it in the next commit. We’re not doing that, of course. Instead, run this:
You’ll get a result like this:
That’s it. The file is gone. To prove it to yourself, you can use git status or even ls/dir.
When you use the -n parameter, git clean displays what would happen but doesn’t actively remove anything.
Here’s another example. Repeat the steps from the previous section to create a file and use git status to verify it’s really there and untracked.
The result is this:
Would remove file.txt
This time, if you use git status or ls/dir, you’ll see the file remains there.
The -i parameter is for interactive. It displays a menu with options you can use for cleaning.
For this example, create two files, totaling three (you didn’t remove the file from the last example, remember?).
As you can see, besides displaying the options menu—which you can access by typing the corresponding number or the first letter of the option—Git tells you which files would be removed should you continue with the operation.
Let’s walk through each option.
Clean
The first option is clean. It wipes out the files:
Removing file.txt
Removing file2.txt
Removing file3.txt
Filter by Pattern
This option allows you to enter patterns you want Git to ignore.
After selecting the filter by pattern option, you’ll see something like this:
Git then displays the files not filtered out by the pattern:
Now, I can simply press Enter to go back to the main menu, where I can decide the fate of these two files.
Select by Numbers
This option allows you to select which files to delete, using numbers. After selecting it, you’ll see numbers assigned to each file:
If you type something different from the three numbers, Git will—somewhat humorously—ask you to do it again:
On the other hand, if you press Enter without entering a valid number, Git simply says, “No more files to clean, exiting” and quits.
To actually remove one or more files, just enter the corresponding numbers. You can either type a single number or multiple numbers separated by space or comma. It’s also possible to use a range (e.g., 1-3) or a * to mean everything.
In our case, let’s remove the first two files:
As you can see, the selected files are marked for exclusion. Press Enter to confirm. You’ll be taken back to the main menu, where you can proceed with the exclusion.
Ask Each
This option walks you through each file, asking whether to exclude it or not. You can answer it with y or n:
What now> 4
Remove file.txt [y/N]? n
Remove file2.txt [y/N]? n
Remove file3.txt [y/N]? y
Removing file3.txt
Use this option if you changed your mind about removing the files. Just press 5 or the letter q, and Git will display a message saying “Bye” and will do no harm to the files.
Finally, this option—which you can access with h or 6—displays a useful yet concise help screen:
Git Remove Untracked Files: Going Further
Having covered the fundamentals of the “Git remove untracked files” operation, let’s now go a little bit deeper, explaining some more topics that might come in handy.
Forcing a Clean by Default
Remember I said that, by default, git clean without arguments doesn’t work. Well, that’s true, but you can change that.
This behavior is due to the clean.requireForce configuration, and you can change it with the git config command.
git config clean.requireForce false
Now, running git clean will remove the untracked files without error and without asking for anything. Use it with caution.
Optionally, you may use the —global option so the configuration applies to all repositories.
Ignoring Files
A common scenario occurs when you don’t want to get rid of unversioned files. You want to keep them there, inside the project’s folder, but not version them.
This is useful for things like personal configuration files or build artifacts. For that scenario, you can use the .gitignore file. This is a file, added to the root of your project, in which you determine files that Git should completely ignore.
It’d be out of the scope of this post to cover .gitignore in much detail, but you can always head to documentation. The good news is that, most of the time, you don’t need to create your .gitignore file yourself. Many frameworks already add them by default when initiating a new application; IDEs can also generate them. Finally, there are sites and public repos dedicated to make .gitignore files available for a variety of languages and ecosystems.
Git: Remove Untracked Files at Your Peril
Generally speaking, it’s hard to lose information for good in Git. The VCS tool does a great job protecting your data once you’ve committed it. But if you get rid of data that Git didn’t save to its internal database, good luck with that.
Your IDE or text editor might offer a way for you to recover the file; maybe you have some form of backup setup on your machine that can save you. As far as Git is concerned, though, you’re out of luck.
Today, you’ve learned how to remove untracked files in Git. This is a useful feature, but as we’ve seen, it can be dangerous. Only use it when you’re sure that you know what you’re doing.
This post was written by Carlos Schults. Carlos is a consultant and software engineer with experience in desktop, web and mobile development. Though his primary language is C#, he has experience with a number of languages and platforms. His main interests include automated testing, version control and code quality.
How do I remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree?
How do I delete untracked local files from the current working tree?
41 Answers 41
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will remove the untracked files from the current git
when you want to remove directories and files, this will delete only untracked directories and files
I think the safe and easy way is this!
Note: First navigate to the directory and checkout the branch you want to clean.
-i interactive mode and it will tell you what will be removed and you can choose an action from the list.
-d including directories.
If you choose c from the list. The files/folders will be deleted that are not tracked and will also remove files/folders that you mess-up.*
For instance: If you restructure the folder in your remote and pull the changes to your local computer. files/folders that are created by others initially will be in past folder and in the new one that you restructure.
Mission: delete untracked files from git repository:
All files and folders has been deleted from the repository.
Lets restore them on localhost if you need them:
How to Discard Unstaged Changes in Git
Last modified: March 29, 2022
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1. Overview
A Git working directory can contain different types of files including staged files, unstaged files, and untracked files.
In this tutorial, we’ll see how to discard changes in our working directory that are not in the index.
2. Analyzing the State of a Working Directory
For our example, let’s say that we’ve forked and cloned a Git Repository and then made some changes to our working directory.
Let’s check the status of our working directory:
Here, we can see some files that are modified and unstaged, along with a new file we added.
Now, let’s stage the existing Java file by using git add and check the state again:
Here, we can see that we have three categories of files in our working directory:
3. Removing the Untracked Files
Untracked files are those which are new to the repository and haven’t been added to version control. We can remove these with the clean command:
The -df option ensures that removal is forced and that untracked directories are also included for removal. Running this command will output which files were removed:
Now, let’s check the status again:
We can see how the clean command has removed the untracked file from our working directory.
4. Removing the Changes Not Staged for Commit
Now that we’ve removed the untracked files, we’re left to deal with the staged and unstaged files inside our working directory. We can use the checkout command with the “–” option to remove all the changes that are not staged for commit:
Let’s check the status again after running the command:
We can see that our working directory now contains only the staged changes.
5. Conclusion
In this tutorial, we saw how our working directory can contain staged, unstaged, and untracked files among the files that aren’t currently under Git version control.
Removing Untracked Files with Git
There are two types of files in a Git repository: tracked and untracked files. You may encounter a scenario where you need to remove untracked files from a Git repository.
Should we remove untracked files? We may have to do so if:
Git Removed Untracked Files
You can handle untracked files from a Git branch using these methods:
In this guide, we’re going to discuss how to remove untracked files with Git. We’ll refer to a few examples so you can get started quickly.
Difference Between Tracked vs. Untracked Files
In your working or local directory your files are either tracked or untracked. Tracked means those files added and committed in a previous snapshot and that Git is aware, tracking them for changes.
Untracked files are the opposite, those files were not in the previous commit and have not been staged to be committed. You have the option of either stage them and commit them to your repository, or remove them!
If we do git status right after modifying/added files it would show us the list of untracked files and files that are tracked.
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The first option is to ignore such files. You could be working on a C++ project that during build you might get files generated you don’t want available.
For instance, you may have a .env file with all your environment variables and database, API, access keys. You wouldn’t want that info out there in the wild either right? This is where .gitignore files come in to play.
Any files that are present in a .gitignore file will not be part of the untracked/tracked Git flow. They’ll be removed from it. So Git will ignore them and not track them nor complain they are not tracked.
First, let’s create a .gitignore file in root. And then we’ll specify the relative path of the location. So if let’s say we want to hide the node_modules and config.env file we just add them as such:
Understanding Gitignore is essential as your project grows so you must be aware which folders or files need to be added there. This is because you don’t want them in the Git workflow as untracked to then stage them by mistake and have Git tracking such sensitive files for everyone to see your keys exposed!
Understanding Gitignore is essential as your project grows so you must be aware which folders or files need to be added there. This is because you don’t want them in the Git workflow as untracked to stage them by mistake. This would cause Git to start tracking files with information that should not be shared in a repository.
Remove Untracked Files Git Option 2: git clean
The next option we have to remove the files is to use the git clean command. The git clean command deletes untracked files from a repository.
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The git clean command starts from your current working directory inside your working tree. Your working tree is the branch you are viewing.
This command would be useful in case, for instance, you accidentally add a folder with high school pictures into a repository instead of another folder.
Git clean takes a couple of options. Let’s take a look at the syntax for this command:
At this point it is worth mentioning that Git clean deletes your file in a hard system way. This means you cannot undo your changes. It is similar to the rm command in the terminal. But, if a file was tracked in a previous commit, we may be able to find an old version.
If we don’t specify a path we often want to include the -d option to have Git look into untracked directories.
Let’s look at this in action. We have our sillyPicture.jpg we don’t want to track and want to remove. Check what will happen:
In order to get Git clean to work, we may need to specify a force option. This option should only be used if you are sure that you want to remove the files you have selected from a repository.
Here you might notice that here git status first pointed out there was an untracked file, then after we deleted with the -f option the file was then gone. C’est fini!
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Although the -f option and Git clean is very powerful, it will not work with ignored files. This because it only works with files Git is aware of and are part of its version control system.
Recommended for beginners. As you’re getting started you might want to be careful of what options you pass in. We already showed you the dry run -n option. There’s also the -i option that will show you an interactive interface you can play with!
Conclusion
To learn more about Git, read our How to Learn Git guide.