Git checkout/pull doesn't remove directories?

Question

Okay, I'm new to git, coming from SVN.

I've got my repo @ github. Last night, did some work at home and pushed it to github. It involved some deleting of files and directories. Now I'm on my work box, which had a copy of the code before deleting the files and directories.

I issued the following:

git remote update
git checkout HEAD
git pull origin HEAD

It deleted all of the files it should have, but not the directories the files were in.

Two questions: why did it not remove the directories and is there a git command I can issue in the current state to remove them?

Answer 1

Git does not track directories currently (see git wiki), that is, you neither can add empty directories nor will git remove directories that end up empty. (EDIT: Thanks, Manni, I was wrong! You can't add empty directories, but git will remove directories that become empty because their tracked content was deleted.)

As to the command to remove the empty directories: that depends on your operating system.

For Linux you could use, e.g.,

find -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;

However, this will remove all empty directories!

Answer 2

As part of most operations that alter the working tree (pull, merge, checkout, etc.) git will remove any directories which are made empty by that operation (i.e. git removed the last file).

git won't remove any directories that aren't completely empty, so if you have hidden or ignored files then just because git removes the last tracked file from that directory doesn't necessarily mean that git will be able to remove that directory. git doesn't consider this to be an error condition so won't complain about it.

Answer 3

Git doesn't track directories, so it won't remove ones that become empty as a result of a merge or other change. However, you can use git clean -fd to remove untracked directories (the -fd flag means force removal of untracked files and directories).