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

Use git clean -f -d to make sure that directories are also removed.

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

   git clean -n
   

   or

   git clean --dry-run
   

2. 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 the -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

   git clean -fd
   

You can then check if your files are really gone with git status.

Answer 2

git clean -fd removes directory

git clean -fX removes ignored files

git clean -fx removes ignored and un-ignored files

can be used all above options in combination as

git clean -fdXx

check git manual for more help

Answer 3

A better way is to use: git clean

git clean -d -x -f

This removes untracked files, including directories (-d) and files ignored by git (-x).

Also, replace the -f argument with -n to perform a dry-run or -i for interactive mode and it will tell you what will be removed.

Answer 4

I am surprised nobody mentioned this before:

git clean -i

That stands for interactive and you will get a quick overview of what is going to be deleted offering you the possibility to include/exclude the affected files. Overall, still faster than running the mandatory --dry-run before the real cleaning.

You will have to toss in a -d if you also want to take care of empty folders. At the end, it makes for a nice alias:

git iclean

That being said, the extra hand holding of interactive commands can be tiring for experienced users. These days I just use the already mentioned git clean -fd

Answer 5

Simple Way to remove untracked files

To remove all untracked files, The simple way is to add all of them first and reset the repo as below

git add --all
git reset --hard HEAD

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Answer 6

To remove the untracked files you should first use command to view the files that will be affected by cleaning

git clean -fdn

This will show you the list of files that will be deleted. Now to actually delete those files use this command:

git clean -fd