NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | INTERACTIVE MODE | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON

GIT-CLEAN(1)                     Git Manual                     GIT-CLEAN(1)

NAME         top

       git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

SYNOPSIS         top

       git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] <path>...

DESCRIPTION         top

       Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not
       under version control, starting from the current directory.
       Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option
       is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example,
       be useful to remove all build products.
       If any optional <path>... arguments are given, only those paths are
       affected.

OPTIONS         top

       -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.
       -f, --force
           If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set
           to false, git clean will refuse to delete files or directories
           unless given -f, -n or -i. Git will refuse to delete directories
           with .git sub directory or file unless a second -f is given.
       -i, --interactive
           Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See
           “Interactive mode” for details.
       -n, --dry-run
           Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.
       -q, --quiet
           Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are
           successfully removed.
       -e <pattern>, --exclude=<pattern>
           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.
       -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.
       -X
           Remove only files ignored by Git. This may be useful to rebuild
           everything from scratch, but keep manually created files.

INTERACTIVE MODE         top

       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:
               *** Commands ***
                   1: clean                2: filter by pattern    3: select by numbers
                   4: ask each             5: quit                 6: help
               What now> 1
       You also could say c or clean above as long as the choice is unique.
       The main command loop has 6 subcommands.
       clean
           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.
       ask each
           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.
       quit
           This lets you quit without do cleaning.
       help
           Show brief usage of interactive git-clean.

SEE ALSO         top

       gitignore(5)

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control system)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual page,
       see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on
       2017-07-05.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
       sion of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date
       source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
       ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.9.2.277.g2949358           07/16/2016                     GIT-CLEAN(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)