Why doesn't Git remove some files when I switch a branch?

Question

I have had this happen to me often. I am working on a master branch and I need to test a plugin, so I create a new branch and check it out. I download the plugin into the project directory and test it out. Then I switch back to the master branch and delete the branch I had created.

What ends up happening is the files of the plugin remain in the project directory. I'm wondering if this is normal behavior. What do I have to do in order to have a seamless switch between branches?

Answer 1

git will not remove untracked files from your working copy, so unless you added the files of the plugin and created a commit on the new branch git will not do anything to your plugin files.

if you want to remove untracked file from your working tree, use git clean – be careful, it will remove any untracked file from disk and there's no way to recover from that (without using undelete software)