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Two Bash scripts I cannot live without when working with Git

Eryk Napierała on November 16, 2019

That's maybe an overstatement, but just a little. I use these two simple scripts for over five years now and I just cannot imagine to not have them...

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Ben Sinclair • Nov 16 '19

I do something similar to your git_clean_local_branches here: git-tidy

It's interesting to see how we both went for basically the same experience but approached it in different ways.

Eryk Napierała • Nov 17 '19

Believe or not, but I didn't know that script. Thanks! Multiple discovery hipothesis confirmed! :)

Elliot Derhay • Nov 17 '19

Interesting. I use Linux on my personal laptop. But being a Windows user at work, I've found myself using PowerShell instead. Will see if I can reimplement these in PS and share. :)

Elliot Derhay • Nov 17 '19 • Edited

I have a suggestion though. For cleaning untracked files, can you prevent having to run git clean -f -d -n twice by storing the output once and then running it through wc -l for checking in the if condition?

Similarly for cleaning branches, what about storing the output of git branch -r | awk "{print \\$1}" | egrep -v -f /dev/fd/0 <(git branch -vv | grep origin) | awk "{print \\$1}"?

I should add I'm suggesting this as someone who doesn't do that much bash scripting, so maybe there's an issue you ran into that I'm not aware of when just reading those one-liners.

Eryk Napierała • Nov 17 '19

It turned out that echo -n trick isn't correct neither. I've decided to add the second condition for empty string, so the final version is:

TO_REMOVE=`git clean -f -d -n`;
if [[ "$TO_REMOVE" != "" ]] && [[ `echo $TO_REMOVE | wc -l | bc` != "0" ]]; then

Elliot Derhay • Nov 17 '19 • Edited

What about wc -l "$TO_REMOVE"?

Eryk Napierała • Nov 18 '19

I don't think it gonna work. It tries to read a file under the path saved in $TO_REMOVE variable. That's not what we want to do.

Elliot Derhay • Nov 18 '19

Oh interesting. Never mind then. Thanks for helping me understand all of this.

Eryk Napierała • Nov 17 '19

You're perfectly right! Back then I had some issues with the "clean" solution and no idea how to do it better. It just worked, so I kept it like this :)

You made me feel a bit challenged, though, so I've decided I'll try to fix the issue.

Basically, the ideal solution would look like this:

TO_REMOVE=`git clean -f -d -n`;
if [[ `echo $TO_REMOVE | wc -l` -ne "0" ]]; then

For some reason, it doesn't work in the case when there is nothing to clean - line count is always equal or greater to one. I cannot remember it, but I suppose that was the exact issue five years ago when I was writing the script.

But now I'm smarter (or just know Bash a bit more :) ) and I know how to do it right! echo adds a new line to the end of the printed string, even when it's empty. Unless -n switch is specified! So the code below works perfectly in all cases.

TO_REMOVE=`git clean -f -d -n`;
if [[ `echo -n $TO_REMOVE | wc -l` -ne "0" ]]; then

I'll update the scripts in the article. Thank you!

Harsh Shandilya • Jun 28 '20

For anything augmenting Git I either build an alias for one-liners, or save it into a file titled git-<action> in PATH which lets me do git <action> like any other git subcommand. You should try that! git clean-safely is probably easier and quicker to type than git_clean_untracked_safely :D

Eryk Napierała • Jul 1 '20

Totally agree! I'm really into three-letter aliases so this command is for me gcl :)

Paweł Kowalski • Nov 16 '19

git clean is a very cool thing in general. I use it in npm scripts to clear things before build (build is usually gitignored). No need for additional packages like rimraf (and not every OS has rm)