How do I clear my local working directory in git? [duplicate]

git clean -df

Edit: It's not well advertised but git clean is really handy. Git Ready has a nice intro to git clean.

Update: removed the x flag based on the suggestion in the comment below

All the answers so far retain local commits. If you're really serious, you can discard all local commits and all local edits by doing:

git reset --hard origin/branchname

For example:

git reset --hard origin/master

This makes your local repository exactly match the state of the origin (other than untracked files).

If you accidentally did this after just reading the command, and not what it does :), use git reflog to find your old commits.

You could create a commit which contains an empty working copy.

This is a generally safe, non-destructive approach because it does not involve the use of any brute-force reset mechanisms. First you hide all managed content with git checkout empty, then you are free to manually review and remove whatever unmanaged content remains.

## create and initialize a temporary repo with an empty working copy
(
mkdir ./temp-repo && cd ./temp-repo && git init
touch ./temp-file && git add . && git commit -m "almost empty"
git rm ./temp-file && git commit -m "empty"
git tag empty
)

## fetch the history from the temporary repo
git remote add empty ./temp-repo && git fetch --tags empty && git remote rm empty
gvfs-trash ./temp-repo ## delete the temporary repo

## clear the working copy
git checkout empty

Your working copy should now be clear of any managed content. All that remains are unmanaged files and the .git folder itself.

To re-populate your working copy...

git checkout master ## or whatever branch you will be using

To switch to another branch, discarding all uncommitted changes (e.g. resulting from Git's strange handling of line endings):

git checkout -f <branchname>

I had a working copy with hundreds of changed files (but empty git diff --ignore-space-at-eol) which I couldn't get rid off with any of the commands I read here, and git checkout <branchname> won't work, either - unless given the -f (or --force) option.

To reset a specific file as git status suggests:

git checkout <filename>

To reset a folder

git checkout <foldername>/*