Copy files without .gitignore?

Question

I had a few Javascript projects and I need to copy or move to another machine. And I would like to ignore files which are already in .gitignore. Now, when I copy the folder I got git ignored folders and files. But, I want to ignore those when I copy (Command + C). How can I configure it?

Answer 1

You can use git clone:

$ git clone machine1:/path/to/project machine2:/target/path

Answer 2

To remove ignored files from a repository, you can use git clean.

git clean -nx

• -n means dry-run; it will cause it to list the files it would delete without actually deleting them.
• -x means remove ignored files.

If you also need to remove directories, specify -d.

After making sure that what above command prints is what you want to remove, replace -n with -f to run it for real.

git clean -fx

Keep in mind that this will delete files, and there is no way of getting them back unless you have a backup.

More info at man git-clean.