How to preserve all ignored files in git clean -fd?

Question

When I have .gitignore data/* and run git clean -fd, the data folder and all its content files are deleted.

What I want is to delete all un

Answer 1

Changing data/* to data/ is not usable for me, because after that you can't whitelist files/folders in excluded folders.

when you put this in .gitignore

data/
!data/foo.txt

the file foo.txt won't be included.

To remove all untracked files (and folders) as they are shown in git status (and keep something like data/* in gitignore) you can use

git ls-files -z -o --exclude-standard | xargs -0 rm -rf

This will list all untracked files and pass them to rm -rf function, which will delete them.

Credits to https://stackoverflow.com/a/3801554/4710968