Git: Exclude a file with git clean

Question

i\'m working on a big python project, and i\'m really sick if .pyc and *~ files. I\'d like to remove them. I\'ve seen that the -X flag of git clean would remove

Answer 1

I put local files that fall into this category in .git/info/exclude (e.g. my IDE project files). They you can do a clean like this:

git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude -z | \
    xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty rm --verbose

Where:

• --others: shows untracked files
• --exclude-from: provide a standard git ignore style file to exclude from the list
• -z / -0: use \0 instead of \n to split names
• --no-run-if-empty: Don't run rm if list is empty

You could create an alias, e.g.:

git config --global alias.myclean '!git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude -z | xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty rm --verbose --interactive'

The --interactive means you have to do git myclean -f to force the deletion.

Reference: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-ls-files (plus the first line of the default .git/info/exclude)