mpsclean

A few years ago I found that using git clean with my MPS projects deleted too much. It deleted the MPS workspace¹, the .idea directory that I would often have in my projects to facilitate remote debugging with IntelliJ IDEA and some .properties files that contained local settings but were ignored by .gitignore.

You can pass options to git clean to exclude all of the above, but the command becomes cumbersome:

git clean -dx -e .idea -e .mps -e '*.properties' -e '*.log'

At some point I defined an alias for the above command:

alias mpsclean="git clean -dx -e .idea -e .mps -e '*.properties' -e '*.log'"

For safety reasons running the command above will not actually do anything as it’s missing a -f or -n flag that would tell it to either delete the files (-f) or do a dry run, listing all the files it is going to delete (-n). The flag needs to be provided explicitly. So I would use the alias like this:

mpsclean -n # do not delete anything yet
# check the list of files and directories to be deleted
mpsclean -f # actually delete the files