From: Jan Berges <jan.berges@uni-bremen.de>
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:43:36 GMT
Subject: Re: git clean -Xdf affects parent and sibling directories
Message-ID: <111052b2-b64e-4146-b8eb-45ee27402ddc@uni-bremen.de>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4j15fnx1.fsf@gitster.g>

On 2/7/25 22:24, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> The command should take the usual pathspec, so "git clean ." should work as expected.

Thank you for the explanations! I tried again with "git clean -Xf -- ." 
and this command still removes parent and sibling content. This seems to 
be at odds with the manual: "If any optional <pathspec>... arguments are 
given, only those paths that match the pathspec are affected."

As far as I can see, if <pathspec> is untracked and ignored, the command 
goes to the topmost ignored directory of the tree and cleans from there.

In the worst case, GIT_WORK_TREE=$HOME, GIT_DIR tracks dotfiles, and all 
other directories such as ~/Documents/ are ignored. Running the command 
in ~/Documents/path/to/another/repository/ would remove everything under 
~/Documents/. (This is not exactly what I did; I did not lose any files. 
In any case, thanks for the advice to always do a dry run first!)

Jan