threads / bug / 47101

[BUG] git clean -d is too greedy

Subject: [BUG] git clean -d is too greedy

## tl;dr

2 messages between Nov 2, 2017 and Nov 2, 2017.

replies: 1people: 1as markdown or json

Hermanni Suominen· Nov 2, 2017, 17:13 UTC · lore
Hi all,

Since commit 6b1db4310 it is possible to make git clean -d to remove nested git repositories if

   1) .gitignore exists in nested repo (either tracked or untracked)
   2) .gitignore is excluded

Regarding to 2) it doesn't matter if .gitignore is excluded from (another) .gitignore or from command-line (but I assume they populate same ignore list so that's just stating the obvious).

To demonstrate this I can run the following commands:

# git init -q foo && cd foo # git init -q bar && cd bar # touch .gitignore bar # git add bar && git commit -qm asd && cd .. # git clean -e .gitignore -dn Would remove bar/bar

Pre 6b1db4310, and if .gitignore isn't exclued, nested repo is correctly skipped:

# git clean -dn Would skip repository bar/

It probably isn't very common use case to exclude .gitignore but nevertheless this has been broken for a while, and to make things worse it can wipe out lots of uncommitted changes.

-- 
Hermanni
Hermanni Suominen· Nov 2, 2017, 18:04 UTC · re: Hermanni Suominen · lore

Re: [BUG] git clean -d is too greedy

I was a bit trigger happy posting this, after digging a bit more this is a way more serious than I originally thought.

>    1) .gitignore exists in nested repo (either tracked or untracked)
>    2) .gitignore is excluded
This can be any file, including those commonly excluded such as *~.

Demonstrating this in a way that looks a lot more likely use case which will potentially wipe out lots of uncommitted work:

# git init -q foo && cd foo # git init -q bar && cd bar # touch bar bar~ # git add bar && git commit -qm asd && cd .. # git clean -e \*~ -dn Would remove bar/bar

If there were more tracked files in nested repo they'd be removed as well as long as there is at least one excluded file in nested repo.

-- 
Hermanni

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