Exclude files from git clean by default

git, git-clean, gitignore

Solution

I'm not aware of any built-in way to achieve that. However, you could easily create an alias for this, to make it less of a hassle:

$ git config alias.xclean "clean -xdf -e .project"

Then you can just run `git xclean` and it will do what you want.

This example configures the alias only for the local working tree. To have it for all git repos on your machine, add the `--global` flag to `git config`.

Problem

In a project I am working on I am using git and eclipse, eclipse creates a `.project` file in the project root. When I do a `git clean` I do not want to remove this file as I have to create this again. I do want `git clean` to remove excluded files and directories (since compiled files are excluded). Normally I do `git clean -xdf` which suits my needs, however I have to exclude the `.project` file each time (`git clean -xdf -e .project`). Simply putting the `.project` in a (global) gitignore file doesn't do the trick, prefixing it with a `!` also doesn't quite fix this as it then shows up in `git status`. So I'm looking to exclude instead of ignore, but I cannot find a git-clean-exclude setting. Did anyone ran into this, and if so how did they solve it?

Original source