Why doesn't Git remove some files when I switch a branch?

Question

I have had this happen to me often. I am working on a master branch and I need to test a plugin, so I create a new branch and check it out. I download the plugin into the pr

Answer 1

git will not remove untracked files from your working copy, so unless you added the files of the plugin and created a commit on the new branch git will not do anything to your plugin files.

if you want to remove untracked file from your working tree, use git clean – be careful, it will remove any untracked file from disk and there's no way to recover from that (without using undelete software)

Answer 2

try checkout -f

see git --help checkout:

Proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. This is used to throw away local changes.

Answer 3

If you are switching back and forth between branches where the directory structures are different, and you find that there are some artifacts left over, you might need to run:

git clean -df

This will "delete" "force". You will loose ALL untracked files, I think this might be one step away from:

git reset --hard