By Don Marti

What do we have to do in make clean? Delete all the files that can be regenerated that we don’t need to keep around.

What’s listed in .gitignore? All the files that can be regenerated that we don’t need to keep around.

Hey, wait a minute. It’s not a good idea to repeat yourself, especially for me, since I have to “start a project” often for demo code. So here’s a way to keep track of all those extre files in one place, with a few lines in Makefile and one handy git command.

Here’s the new clean target:

# Remove anything listed in the .gitignore file.
# Remove empty directories because they cannot be versioned.
clean :
        find . -path ./.git -prune -o -print0 | \
        git check-ignore -z --stdin | xargs -0 rm -f
        find . -depth -mindepth 1 -type d -print0 | \
        xargs -0 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty

In this case, we’re just running a find on everything except the .git directory, and using the git check-ignore command to see if they’re ignorable by git. If the answer is yes, then they’re fine to remove—so no more keeping track of them in two places.

The second find is just to get rid of empty directories, which Git won’t track anyway. And the -print0, -z, and -0 options in both lines are to use null characters between filenames, just to prevent weirdness if you end up with a file with a space in its name.

(To hook your regular Makefile up to build complete VMs, just use Capstan. Get a complete VM, ready to run on any cloud, in only 7.5 to 9 seconds.)

What, is that it?

Fine, have a bonus tip. If you’re a fan of What colour is it, the site that changes background color to match the current time, here’s how to do the same thing on a GNOME desktop:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background primary-color "#$(date +%H%M%S)"

(Those of you on something other than Linux+GNOME, developer desktop tips for your setup are welcome.)

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