World 2: Undo Magic

Clean up junk files

You will learn: how to preview and delete untracked junk files.

The problem

Your diary folder is full of junk test files. Deleting them one by one is slow and boring.

Watch

git clean -f deletes files: new files Git never saved. This is called . Tracked files stay safe.

Watch

⚠️ Danger: clean deletes for good. There is no bin and no undo. So always preview first with git clean -n.

Predict

You run git clean -n in this folder. Which files does it list?

index.html         tracked
debug.log          ignored (*.log)
test.html          untracked
index-copy.html    untracked
tmp/scribble.txt   untracked, in a folder

Check

~/diary $ git clean -nWould remove index-copy.htmlWould remove test.html~/diary $ git clean -n -dWould remove index-copy.htmlWould remove test.htmlWould remove tmp/

-n only shows, it deletes nothing. Add -d to include folders. debug.log never shows up, because it is ignored.

Try it

Preview first. Then delete the junk files and the tmp folder.

Working folder

Staging area

Empty

Repository

4 save points
Ignore log files
Add style
Add day 1 page

Hint

Preview with git clean -n -d. Then delete with git clean -f -d.

You did it!

You can now clean up junk files. Preview first, always!

Go deeper (optional)

Plain git clean refuses to delete anything without -f. That is Git being careful. -x deletes ignored files too, like .env or log files. Be very careful with it. This practice terminal blocks -x. git clean -i asks about each file.