# git-clean(1) Manual Page

## NAME

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

## SYNOPSIS

    git clean [-d] [-f] [-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.

## OPTIONS

-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.

-f
--force

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

-n
--dry-run

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

-q
--quiet

  Be quiet, only report errors, but not the files that are successfully removed.

-e <pattern>
--exclude=<pattern>

  In addition to those found in .gitignore (per directory) and $GIT_DIR/info/exclude, also consider these patterns to be in the set of the ignore rules in effect.

-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.

## SEE ALSO

gitignore(5)

## GIT

Part of the git(1) suite