git: undo all working dir changes including new files

For all tracked unstaged files use:

git checkout -- .

The . at the end is important.

You can replace . with a sub-directory name to clear only a specific sub-directory of your project. The problem is addressed specifically here.


Have a look at the git clean command.

git-clean - Remove untracked files from the working tree

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.


git reset --hard # removes staged and working directory changes

## !! be very careful with these !!
## you may end up deleting what you don't want to
## read comments and manual.
git clean -f -d # remove untracked
git clean -f -x -d # CAUTION: as above but removes ignored files like config.
git clean -fxd :/ # CAUTION: as above, but cleans untracked and ignored files through the entire repo (without :/, the operation affects only the current directory)

To see what will be deleted before-hand, without actually deleting it, use the -n flag (this is basically a test-run). When you are ready to actually delete, then remove the -n flag:

git clean -nfd


Safest method, which I use frequently:

git clean -fd

Syntax explanation as per /docs/git-clean page:

  • -f (alias: --force). If the Git configuration variable clean.requireForce is not set to false, git clean will refuse to delete files or directories unless given -f, -n or -i. Git will refuse to delete directories with .git sub directory or file unless a second -f is given.
  • -d. Remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files. If an untracked directory is managed by a different Git repository, it is not removed by default. Use -f option twice if you really want to remove such a directory.

As mentioned in the comments, it might be preferable to do a git clean -nd which does a dry run and tells you what would be deleted before actually deleting it.

Link to git clean doc page: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clean

Tags:

Git