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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | INTERACTIVE MODE | CONFIGURATION | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-CLEAN(1) Git Manual GIT-CLEAN(1)
git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree
git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e <pattern>] [-x | -X] [--] [<pathspec>...]
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.
-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.
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.
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.
gitignore(5)
Part of the git(1) suite
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 2025-08-11. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-07.) 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 2.51.0.rc1 2025-08-07 GIT-CLEAN(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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