til/git/remove-untracked-files-from-a-directory.md

Remove Untracked Files From A Directory

Let's say I have a directory (spec/cassettes) full of a ton of generated YAML files. Most of these files are tracked by git. However, I just generated a bunch of new ones that are untracked. For whatever reason, I don't want these files. I need to delete them.

Running rm on each of them is going to be too tedious. And it is tricky to target them for a bulk delete since there are a ton of other files in that directory that I want to keep.

One way to approach this is have git ls-files help out with listing all files in the directory that are untracked. The --others flag filters to untracked files.

git ls-files --others --exclude-standard spec/cassettes

From there, I can pipe it to rm (with xargs collapsing all the files into a single line):

git ls-files --others --exclude-standard spec/cassettes | xargs rm

See man git-ls-files for more details.