Linux command to delete all files except .git folder?

Question

I want to delete all of the current directory's content except for the .git/ folder before I copy the new files into the branch.

What's the linux command for that?

Answer 1

Resetting the index is cheap, so

git rm -rf .
git clean -fxd

Then you can reset the index (with git reset) or go straight on to checking out a new branch.

Answer 2

With find and prune option.

find . -path ./.git -prune -o -exec rm -rf {} \; 2> /dev/null

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Edit: For two directories .git and dist

find . -path ./.git -prune -o \( \! -path ./dist \) -exec rm -rf {} \; 2> /dev/null

Answer 3

As Crayon mentioned in the comments, the easy solution would be to just move .git out of the directory, delete everything, and then move it back in. But if you want to do it the fancy way, find has got your back:

find -not -path "./.git/*" -not -name ".git" | grep git
find -not -path "./.git/*" -not -name ".git" -delete

The first line I put in there because with find, I always want to double-check to make sure it's finding what I think it is, before running the -delete.

Edit: Added -not -name ".git", which keeps it from trying to delete the .git directory, and suppresses the errors. Depending on the order find tries to delete things, it may fail on non-empty directories.

Answer 4

One way is to use rm -rf *, which will delete all files from the folder except the dotfiles and dotfolders like .git. You can then delete the dotfiles and dotfolders one by one, so that you don't miss out on important dotfiles like .gitignore, .gitattributes later.

Another approach would be to move your .git folder out of the directory and then going back and deleting all the contents of the folder and moving the .git folder back.

mv .git/ ../
cd ..
rm -rf folder/*
mv .git/ folder/
cd folder

Answer 5

for i in `ls | grep -v ".git"` ; do rm -rf $i; done; rm .gitignore;

the additional rm at the end will remove the special .gitignore. Take that off if you do need the file.