git-clean(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | INTERACTIVE MODE | CONFIGURATION | 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] [--] [<pathspec>...]

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 <pathspec>... arguments are given, only those
       paths that match the pathspec are affected.

OPTIONS         top

       -d
           Normally, when no <pathspec> is specified, git clean will not
           recurse into untracked directories to avoid removing too
           much. Specify -d to have it recurse into such directories as
           well. If a <pathspec> is specified, -d is irrelevant; all
           untracked files matching the specified paths (with exceptions
           for nested git directories mentioned under --force) will be
           removed.

       -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. Git will refuse to modify
           untracked nested git repositories (directories with a .git
           subdirectory) unless a second -f is given.

       -i, --interactive
           Show what would be done and clean files interactively. See
           “Interactive mode” for details. Configuration variable
           clean.requireForce is ignored, as this mode gives its own
           safety protection by going interactive.

       -n, --dry-run
           Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.
           Configuration variable clean.requireForce is ignored, as
           nothing will be deleted anyway.

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

       -e <pattern>, --exclude=<pattern>
           Use the given exclude pattern in addition to the standard
           ignore rules (see gitignore(5)).

       -x
           Don’t use the standard ignore rules (see gitignore(5)), but
           still use the ignore rules given with -e options from the
           command line. This allows removing all untracked files,
           including build products. This can be used (possibly in
           conjunction with git restore or 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 exclude files ending 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 doing any cleaning.

       help
           Show brief usage of interactive git-clean.

CONFIGURATION         top

       Everything below this line in this section is selectively
       included from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the
       same as what’s found there:

       clean.requireForce
           A boolean to make git-clean refuse to delete files unless -f
           is given. Defaults to true.

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 2024-06-14.  (At that time,
       the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2024-06-12.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version 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 manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Git 2.45.2.492.gd63586         2024-06-12                   GIT-CLEAN(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)