Cleaning up the local working directory in Git
This article explains how to clean up your local working directory in Git. We will see how to eliminate uncommitted changes and untracked files.
git cleanWe will also remove untracked folders
using the command. Let’s jump right in.
Cleaning up the local working directory in Git
Let's take the following working directory as our working directory.
Let's say we want to clean up everything in our working directory. This means discarding changes made to the README.md file and all untracked files and folders.
What should we do?
There are several commands we can use to process the modified files.
-
We can use
git checkoutthe command. -
git restore <file>Order. -
git reset --hardOrder.
See the example below.
$ git checkout README.md
The above command will reset our README.md file to the last committed state in our repository. It will eliminate the uncommitted changes.
Example 2:
$ git restore README.md
Git recommends using this command. It will discard the changes made to the README.md file in our working directory .
Example 3:
$ git reset --hard
This command comes in handy when we have dozens of files in our working directory. git reset --hardInstead of checking or restoring them one by one, you can run the command.
It will reset our repository to the state of our last commit.
We have seen how to clean up the staging area. What about untracked files and folders?
Before deleting untracked files, it is recommended to do a back check. You can run it cleanthe command with dry run option to see which files and folders will be discarded.
To do this, run:
$ git clean -n -d
Once you are sure you want to remove everything under untracked, run the following command.
$ git clean -f
The above command will delete the files. To delete the folder, run:
$ git clean -f -d
To remove ignored files, run:
$ git clean -f -X
Here is an example.
In short, we can use a few commands to clean up the working directory in Git. git cleanThe command processes all the untracked files and folders.
Always run in dry run mode git cleanto check what will be deleted.
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