Question

i am sure *.lib is in .gitignore

cat .gitignore | grep lib
*.lib

$ ls lib
TLib.lib  TLib_d.lib


$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)


$ git clean -dfX

$ ls lib
TLib.lib  TLib_d.lib     // the issue is here...

why these .lib files are not deleted?

Answer 1

Git stops searching files, once it encounters a directory not in the index. But in the case above, we are telling git to search all files matching ignore pattern. So, it’d better go in to all directories and search files.

This will also match git ls-files behavior. Given:

$ tree
.
├── foo.o
└── lib
    ├── TLib_d.lib
    └── TLib.lib

1 directory, 3 files

$ cat .gitignore
*.lib

Run following commands.

$ git ls-files -o
foo.o
lib/TLib.lib
lib/TLib_d.lib

$ git ls-files -o -i --exclude-standard
lib/TLib.lib
lib/TLib_d.lib

$ git clean -n
Would remove foo.o
Would not remove lib/

$ git clean -nd
Would remove foo.o
Would remove lib/

$ git clean -nX

The last command does not print any files. But it would be nice if it did:

$ git clean -nX
Would not remove foo.o
Would not remove lib/
Would remove lib/TLib.lib
Would remove lib/TLib_d.lib