From: Ilya Basin Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 09:05:52 GMT Subject: How to recursively clean only those untracked files that are not ignored? Message-ID: <925417488.20140419130552@gmail.com> According to the help, without -x option git clean should let alone the ignored files, but it doesn't. [il@reallin test]$ cat .gitignore *.sar [il@reallin test]$ mkdir -p conf/sar && touch conf/sar/aaa.sar [il@reallin test]$ git status # On branch master nothing to commit, working directory clean [il@reallin test]$ git clean -df Removing conf/ conf/sar/aaa.sar is removed. I already asked this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23148736/git-clean-removes-ignored-files-by-default Someone even replied that "git does exactly what documentation says". Well, maybe, but I have doubts that the combination '-df' (without '-x') is useful at all. If someone wanted to delete ignored files, he would use '-x' or '-X'.