I'm having some trouble with git clean, and I'm not sure if it's a bug, or if I'm doing something wrong.
One script is required, reset-test.sh which will copy the files needed for the tests from the reset-files directory (which you can do manually if you prefer, for instance, if you are a Windows user).
To prepare for the first test, run ./reset-test.sh 1 (or copy the files from reset-files/test1 to the root of your directory).
As we begin, .gitignore looks like this:
ignore/no-forwardslash
ignore/no-wildcard/
ignore/wildcard/*
We can tell it's working properly, as all three directories (and their contents) are being ignored by GIT. You can test this yourself by running git status and seeing which files show up in the list.
We want to get rid of that pesky untracked-file, so clean it up by running git clean -d -f. It should ignore the three directories in ignore, since they are specified in .gitignore, right? WRONG! The entire ignore folder and all its contents are removed; this is despite us not using the -x flag! That's a shame. Let's try to fix this.
We could have tried git clean -f (without the -d flag) but that will leave the entire ignore folder, including all of its untracked contents.
Let's try something else. First, run ./reset-test.sh 2. .gitignore now explicitly ignores the entire ignore folder:
ignore
ignore/no-forwardslash
ignore/no-wildcard/
ignore/wildcard/*
Now run git clean -d -f. Great! The three folders are ignored, but we have another problem. In this case, git clean was doing it's job correctly, since we told it to ignore the entire ignore folder.
But what if we have a folder inside of ignore named untracked-folder was supposed to be deleted, but was not? (which in this case, we actually did) This still leaves us no way to define which files in ignore to ignore without manually defining them in .gitignore. I'm still not satisfied!
For kicks, let's add a tracked folder to the ignore file. Run ./reset-test.sh 3 which adds a new file for us to track, and reverts .gitignore back to looking like this:
ignore/no-forwardslash
ignore/no-wildcard/
ignore/wildcard/*
We need to add the file manually in git by running the following:
git add ignore/tracked-file
git commit -m "Added 'tracked-file'"
Now we get to the real reason I created these elaborate tests! Run git clean -d -f.
$ git clean -d -f
Removing ignore/untracked-folder/
Removing ignore/wildcard/
Removing untracked-file
Good news is, it no longer deleted the entire ignore folder; it deleted all the untracked files and folders.
Bad news is it also deleted ignore/wildcard/ even though we specifically requested GIT to keep that folder in gitignore.
After further thinking, it looks like we told GIT to keep the contents of the folder. But we didn't tell gitignore to keep the folder itself, so it took it upon itself to remove it for us. (sigh)
It's been a long day, and I'm tired of fiddling around with this.
From what I can tell after the tests, clean removes everything not specifically named in gitignore (which is what it is supposed to do). Then problem is, even if a subfolder or file is defined in gitignore, unless its parent folder is defined as well, the subfolder will be removed along with its parent.
Second, don't use wildcards for folder contents in gitignore as the folder will still be eligible for "cleaning".
The only workaround I have found is to add tracked files into every untracked "parent folder", but that defies the whole purpose of ignoring them.
Is this how git clean is supposed to work, or am I using it incorrectly?