Sometimes files are accidentally spilled into a Git repo. Before the files are git add, they are “untracked”. If the files match a pattern in “.gitignore” they will not appear in Git operations generally. Untracked, non-ignored files show with:

git status --porcelain

like

?? oops.txt

where the question marks indicate the file is untracked.

These files may be interactively removed (deleted) by:

git clean -id

When there are files spilled in multiple directories, the “filter by pattern” options lets you select files to retain. The updated display shows files to be deleted. When satisfied, select “Clean”–there’s no recovering those files trivially, so be sure of your choices.

To clean files matching patterns in .gitignore, add the “-x” option like:

git clean -xid

That’s useful for cleaning up in source builds, perhaps from Makefile or LaTeX.