til/git/list-untracked-files-for-scripting.md

List Untracked Files For Scripting

You'll generally run git status to get an overview of the index and working tree of a git project. This is a porcelain command meant for a Git end-user. If you want to do some scripting, you'll want a plumbing command like ls_files.

The git ls-files command will

Show information about files in the index and the working tree

This command can be used to list all untracked files in the working tree with two flags.

1. The --others flag will show untracked files in the output
2. The --exclude-standard will use the standard ignore files like .gitignore and .git/info/exclude.

Put it all together and you've got:

$ git ls-files --others --exclude-standard

In Make One-Line Commands Interactive with fzf, I show how to use this with fzf to interactively remove untracked files that are no longer wanted.

source