Question

I have a few files in my git status -s listed as,

?? file1

?? filepath/file2

?? file3

?? filepath/file4

I have been ignoring these and going along committing, pushing, pulling, and I am at the point where there are too many of these in my status report.

I tried git rm file1. It doesn’t work. It says fatal path doesn’t match any files.

Thanks!

Answer 1

These are untracked files, i.e. the files which are present in your file system, but you’ve never added them to your repository by git add.

If you don’t need them, you can just rm them. Or simply git clean -fd if you want to delete them all. If you want to do some filtering before removing them, you can do:

git ls-files -o --exclude-standard | grep 'my custom filter' | xargs rm

If you want to keep those files, but want git status to ignore them, add them to .gitignore file. Read man gitignore for the details.