how to remove untracked files in Git?

Question

To remove untracked files / directories do:

git clean -fdx

-f - force

-d - directories too

-x - remove ignored files too ( don't use this if you don't want to remove ignored files)

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Use with Caution!
These commands can permanently delete arbitrary files, that you havn't thought of at first. Please double check and read all the comments below this answer and the --help section, etc., so to know all details to fine-tune your commands and surely get the expected result.

User interactive approach:

git clean -i -fd

Remove .classpath [y/N]? N
Remove .gitignore [y/N]? N
Remove .project [y/N]? N
Remove .settings/ [y/N]? N
Remove src/com/amazon/arsdumpgenerator/inspector/ [y/N]? y
Remove src/com/amazon/arsdumpgenerator/manifest/ [y/N]? y
Remove src/com/amazon/arsdumpgenerator/s3/ [y/N]? y
Remove tst/com/amazon/arsdumpgenerator/manifest/ [y/N]? y
Remove tst/com/amazon/arsdumpgenerator/s3/ [y/N]? y

-i for interactive
-f for force
-d for directory
-x for ignored files(add if required)

Note: Add -n or --dry-run to just check what it will do.

Those are untracked files. This means git isn't tracking them. It's only listing them because they're not in the git ignore file. Since they're not being tracked by git, git reset won't touch them.

If you want to blow away all untracked files, the simplest way is git clean -f (use git clean -n instead if you want to see what it would destroy without actually deleting anything). Otherwise, you can just delete the files you don't want by hand.

For deleting untracked files:

git clean -f

For deleting untracked directories as well, use:

git clean -f -d

For preventing any cardiac arrest, use

git clean -n -f -d

You may also return to the previous state of the local repo in another way:

1. Add the untracked files to the staging area with git add.
2. return to the previous state of the local repo with git reset --hard.