I had a huge list of superfluous changes in git that I wanted to clean up. Most of them were additions so doing a git checkout wasn’t going to work.

I followed some instructions online and ran: git clean -r -d -x

The trojan horse of this command is the -x flag which will delete all files in your .gitignore!

This led to a half day of setting up my dev environment again to recover all the lost environmental configurations deleted by this command.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s lesson: Adventures with rm -rf /