Index / Git Basics / 2-2 Recording Changes to the Repository / 2-2-1 Checking the Status of Your Files
The main tool you use to determine which files are in which state is the git status command. If you run this command directly after a clone, you should see something like this:
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working directory clean
This means you have a clean working directory; in other words, none of your tracked files are modified. Git also doesn’t see any untracked files, or they would be listed here. Finally, the command tells you which branch you’re on and informs you that it has not diverged from the same branch on the server. For now, that branch is always “master”, which is the default; you won’t worry about it here. Git Branching will go over branches and references in detail.
Let’s say you add a new file to your project, a simple README file. If the file didn’t exist before, and you run git status, you see your untracked file like so:
$ echo 'My Project' > README
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
README
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
You can see that your new README file is untracked, because it’s under the “Untracked files” heading in your status output. Untracked basically means that Git sees a file you didn’t have in the previous snapshot (commit); Git won’t start including it in your commit snapshots until you explicitly tell it to do so. It does this so you don’t accidentally begin including generated binary files or other files that you did not mean to include. You do want to start including README, so let’s start tracking the file.
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