git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Synopsis

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

Description

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.

Step 1 is to show what will be deleted by using the -n option:

# Print out the list of files and directories which will be removed (dry run)
git clean -n -d

Clean Step - beware: this will delete files:

# Delete the files from the repository
git clean -f

• To remove directories, run git clean -f -d or git clean -fd
• To remove ignored files, run git clean -f -X or git clean -fX
• To remove ignored and non-ignored files, run git clean -f -x or git clean -fx

Note the case difference on the X for the two latter commands.

If clean.requireForce is set to "true" (the default) in your configuration, one needs to specify -f otherwise nothing will actually happen.

Again see the git-clean docs for more information.

Options

-f, --force

If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to run unless given -f, -n or -i.

-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.

-n, --dry-run

Don’t actually remove anything, just show what would be done.

-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.

The problem is that you are not tracking the files locally but identical files are tracked remotely so in order to "pull" your system would be forced to overwrite the local files which are not version controlled.

Try running

git add *
git stash
git pull

This will track all files, remove all of your local changes to those files, and then get the files from the server.

If I understand your question correctly, you want to reset all files that are currently tracked to the previous commit and leave the untracked files alone.

If so, then I would do as follows.

First way

As mentioned by Porges in the comments.

First unstage all your currently modified files:

git reset

Then reset all unstaged modified files to the previous commit.

git checkout -- .

Second way (Git 1.7.7+ only)

First I would stash the tracked files as follows:

git stash

Then I would stash the untracked files as follows:

git stash -u

Hence, now you have two stashes on your stack: one with tracked files on the bottom and one with untracked files on the top. Pop off the tracked files as follows (aka apply the stash that is second in the stack):

git stash apply stash@{1}

Then reset to the previous commit:

git reset --hard

Finally, apply the untracked files:

git stash apply

A file is tracked if it is under version control.

As a small example, a C++ project would have

Makefile
main.cpp
interface.hpp
worker.cpp

as source files; you'd put these under version control. During build,

main.o
worker.o
myapp

are generated; these do not belong under version control, so you do not use git add on them. They remain untracked, because git does not care what happens to them. Until you add them to .gitignore (the .o files are ignored by default), git does not known whether you want to add or ignore them, so it displays them with the git status command until you make a decision.

Whether a file is tracked or not also depends on the version -- suppose you autogenerate worker.cpp and remove it from version control at a later version. The file is now untracked in that version. When you go back to a version where the file was still under version control, git will refuse to overwrite that file during checkout.