git: How to ignore all present untracked files?

As already been said, to exclude from status just use:

git status -uno  # must be "-uno" , not "-u no"

If you instead want to permanently ignore currently untracked files you can, from the root of your project, launch:

git status --porcelain | grep '^??' | cut -c4- >> .gitignore

Every subsequent call to git status will explicitly ignore those files.

UPDATE: the above command has a minor drawback: if you don’t have a .gitignore file yet your gitignore will ignore itself! This happens because the file .gitignore gets created before the git status --porcelain is executed. So if you don’t have a .gitignore file yet I recommend using:

echo "$(git status --porcelain | grep '^??' | cut -c4-)" > .gitignore

This creates a subshell which completes before the .gitignore file is created.

COMMAND EXPLANATION as I’m getting a lot of votes (thank you!) I think I’d better explain the command a bit:

• git status --porcelain is used instead of git status --short because manual states “Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain stable across git versions and regardless of user configuration.” So we have both the parseability and stability;
• grep '^??' filters only the lines starting with ??, which, according to the git status manual, correspond to the untracked files;
• cut -c4- removes the first 3 characters of every line, which gives us just the relative path to the untracked file;
• the | symbols are pipes, which pass the output of the previous command to the input of the following command;
• the >> and > symbols are redirect operators, which append the output of the previous command to a file or overwrites/creates a new file, respectively.

ANOTHER VARIANT for those who prefer using sed instead of grep and cut, here’s another way:

git status --porcelain | sed -n -e 's/^?? //p' >> .gitignore