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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

The problem with `git clean` is -X vs -x. -x (lowercase) removes EVERYTHING including .env files and other untracked files. -X (uppercase) removes only ignored files, but not untracked files.

If there is a Makefile with a clean target, usually the first thing I do when I start is make it an alias for `git clean -X`.

Usually, you want to keep your untracked files (they are usually experiments, debugging hooks, or whatever).

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This. I have no urge to have git "clean" my project, because I'll lose a ton of files I have created locally. Rather, I want the project know what it creates when it builds and have the ability to clean/purge them. It's a never ending source of frustration for me that "gradlew clean" only cleans _some_ stuff, and there's no real "gradlew distclean".

Hmm, I wonder what's the best way™ to, er "locally backup" those files, in such a way that no git-clean invocation will remove them without promoting.

All I can think of are things like periodically copying them to another folder, or give them a different ownership needed for edit/delete, etc.

Unless there's some kind of .gitpreserve feature...

You can have locally ignores files in .git/info/exclude IIRC.

I know there are local-only git settings, but AFAIK ignore-status won't protect files from being removed/overwritten by all possible git commands, it just means they won't be accidentally staged/committed.

You are almost certainly right that I was using -X. It's been a while since I had to deal with git.

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