Clean Local Working Branch

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Sometimes if the local working branch messes up but you want to sync up with your remote branch, for example origin master, first remove all untracked files:

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# -d: remove untracked dirs
# -f: force
git clean -df
# -x: remove ignored files as well
git clean -dfx

you can have a dry-run first to see what files will be removed

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# -n: dry run
git clean -dfn

Check the commit logs in current branch:

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# verbose
# -n: commit number
git log -n 10

# oneline and color
# color: show color
git log --oneline --color -n 10

# -p: show diff for each commit
git log -p --oneline --color -n 10

# show branch relationship
# --graph: show ascii graph
git log --graph --oneline --color -n 10

Then properly select one good commit that also appears in remote master branch, run

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git reset --hard <good commit hash>

All the commits later than the good commit hash will be removed, then you can just run the command below to sync up remote master branch.

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git pull origin master

Note that it’s safe to do git reset here because only I use this branch and I want to clean

Sometimes I see people use:

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# reset to current commit, discard all uncommitted changes
git reset --hard HEAD
# HEAD~1: move to the commit right before HEAD
git reset --hard HEAD~1

HEAD points to your current commit, check by:

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# get HEAD short hash
git rev-parse --short HEAD

so all that git reset --hard HEAD will do is to throw away any uncommitted changes you have and point to your latest commit.

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