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.
Best Answer
If I understand the question correctly, you simply want to "undo" the
git add
that was done for that file.If you need to remove a single file from the staging area, use
git reset HEAD -- <file>
If you need to remove a whole directory (folder) from the staging area, use
git reset HEAD -- <directoryName>
Your modifications will be kept. When you run
git status
the file will once again show up as modified but not yet staged.See the
git reset
man page for details.