How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree

Question

How do you delete untracked local files from your current working tree?

Answer 1

uggested Command for Removing Untracked Files from git docs is git clean

git clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Suggested Method: Interative Mode by using git clean -i so we can have control over it. let see remaining available options.

Available Options:

git clean 
    -d -f -i -n -q -e -x -X (can use either)

Explanation:

1. -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.

2. -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.

3. -i, --interactive

Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See “Interactive mode” for details.

4. -n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

5. -q, --quiet

Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are successfully removed.

6. -e , --exclude=

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.

7. -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.

8. -X

Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.