CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
blueFast
blueFast

Reputation: 44331

git clean removes empty directories

This is what I did:

$ git status
# I see some files *and* directories (some tracked, some not) which I really wanted to discard
$ git clean -xd

And I am surprised to see that git removes some other directories, which were not shown in git status. After an initial schock (this was my /etc in one of my production hosts) I realize that they were not listed by git because they were empty directories (so not a big deal, just mkdir them - hoping to get permissions right). Which is fine, but:

Why on earth does git not consider empty directories when doing git status, but does consider them when doing git clean? This is very annoying (and dangerous)!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4381

Answers (1)

Alex Wolf
Alex Wolf

Reputation: 20118

As you already seem to know: You can't add empty directories in git (If not see the FAQ).

git status effectivly tells you which changes you can add and commit. So, even if it would be possible for git status to display empty directories, this would be highly confusing for the user.

Why can I see this directory but not track it?

git clean on the other hand removes everything which isn't tracked. Using the -d option also tells clean to remove untracked directories.

But what defines an untracked directory?

As we learned, git doesn't track directories, it tracks files (or more specific file contents). In turn this means that an untracked director is nothing else but a directory which doesn't contain any tracked files. This applies for the build folder you ignore with multiple hundred of files, as it does for the empty tmp folder, you created earlier and forgot about.

If you want to make sure that git clean doesn't remove anything you want to keep, you should use the -n (--dry-run) option (which is described in the documentation). This tells you about all files git clean will remove.

To ensure that you don't forget -n (--dry-run) you can create an alias.

git config --global alias.status-clean "clean --dry-run"

Which you can now easily use like git status-clean -dx to display all files which would be removed by a git clean -dx call.

TL;DR: Don't use git status to see what git clean -d will remove. Use git clean -d --dry-run.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions