Why doesn't Git remove some files when I switch a branch?

I have had this happen to me often. I am working on a master branch and I need to test a plugin, so I create a new branch and check it out. I download the plugin into the project directory and test it out. Then I switch back to the master branch and delete the branch I had created.

What ends up happening is the files of the plugin remain in the project directory. I'm wondering if this is normal behavior. What do I have to do in order开发者_StackOverflow中文版 to have a seamless switch between branches?

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git will not remove untracked files from your working copy, so unless you added the files of the plugin and created a commit on the new branch git will not do anything to your plugin files.

if you want to remove untracked file from your working tree, use git clean – be careful, it will remove any untracked file from disk and there's no way to recover from that (without using undelete software)

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If you are switching back and forth between branches where the directory structures are different, and you find that there are some artifacts left over, you might need to run:

git clean -df

This will "delete" "force". You will loose ALL untracked files, I think this might be one step away from:

git reset --hard

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try checkout -f

see git --help checkout:

Proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. This is used to throw away local changes.