Error: the following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge

Question

Problem :

On the branch I had some files in the .gitignore

On the different branch those files are not.

I am trying to merge the different branch into my branch, and I don't bother if those files are no longer overlooked or not.

Unfortunately I get below error :

“The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge”

How should I modify the pull command to overwrite those files, without needing to find, move or delete those files by myself?

Answer 1

You can try the command to clear your untracked files from your local

Git 2.11 and newer versions as below:

git clean  -d  -f .

Older versions of Git as below :

git clean  -d  -f ""

Where -d can be replaced with the below options:

· -x ignored files are also removed as well as the files unknown to Git are also removed.

· -d removed the untracked directories in addition to untracked the files.

· -f is necessary to force it to run.

OR

The problem with you is that you are not tracking your files locally but identical files are getting tracked remotely so in order to "pull" the system must be forced to overwrite your local files which are not the version controlled.

Try running below commands :

git add * 

git stash

git pull

This will solve your issue.

Answer 2

The problem is that you are not tracking the files locally but identical files are tracked remotely so in order to "pull" your system would be forced to overwrite the local files which are not version controlled.

Follow this code

git add * 
git stash
git pull

This will track all files, remove all of your local changes to those files, and then get the files from the server.

You can try command to clear the untracked files from the local

Git 2.11 and newer versions:

git clean  -d  -f .

Older versions of Git:

git clean  -d  -f ""

Where -d can be replaced with the following:

• -x ignored files are also removed as well as files unknown to Git.

• -d remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files.

• -f is required to force it to run.

A replacement for git pull that will overwrite untracked files

pull = fetch + merge, so we do git fetch followed by the git checkout -f, git checkout, git merge trick above.

git fetch origin  # fetch remote commits
git checkout -f origin/mybranch  # replace FOI with tracked upstream versions
git checkout mybranch  # FOI are not in mybranch, so they disapppear
git merge origin/mybranch  # Now the merge works. fetch + merge completes the pull.