Merging but overwriting changes in Git

Question

When I merge a branch in Git to master I often get merge conflicts. Is there a way to merge a branch and just overwrite the stuff in the current branch?

My experience with automatically choosing one side for a merge has never been good .. also, isn't it the point of merge conflicts to check what other people changed near the same lines as you before removing their changes? — KristofMols, Jan 11 '13 at 13:15
It's me that made the branch locally in the first place.. it's just quicker than trawling through the file and removing the conflicts — John Hunt, Jan 11 '13 at 16:42

kmkaplan · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-11T16:57:42.787

79

Add -X ours argument to your git merge command.

Say you are working in your local branch. Then you want to merge in what went in the master:

git merge -X ours master

On the other hand if you are in master and want to merge your local branch into master then @elhadi rightly says you should use theirs:

git merge -X theirs somebranch

edited Jan 11 '13 at 16:57

answered Jan 11 '13 at 10:18

kmkaplan

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@elhadi My understanding is that John Hunt wants to push *his* work, not theirs. – kmkaplan Jan 11 '13 at 10:34
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It was a local branch yes. Eg I've been working on somebranch and want to merge/replace somebranch files in place of the ones on master. – John Hunt Jan 11 '13 at 16:43
This still give the "files would be overwritten by merge" error instead of overwriting them with `-X theirs`. – feeela Jan 18 '22 at 11:48
Some of the files just stay as they are .. not sure why – Ricky Levi Nov 13 '22 at 13:51

score 8 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 11 '19 at 21:57

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To overwrite your stuff in your branch and take their work, you should make

git merge -X theirs {remote/branch} --> example:origin/master

edited Feb 11 '19 at 21:57

PhD

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answered Jan 11 '13 at 10:29

elhadi dp ıpɐɥןǝ

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what does `--strategy=recursive` add here? – red888 Jul 16 '18 at 18:57
gives me `merge: origin/master - not something we can merge` – Ricky Levi Nov 13 '22 at 13:42
I think, your remote doesn't exist, see this topic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16862933/how-to-resolve-gits-not-something-we-can-merge-error – elhadi dp ıpɐɥןǝ Nov 14 '22 at 14:59

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 13 '23 at 14:17

I have found merge doesn't really make the target branch a mirror copy of the source branch.

If that is what you are after, in order to get the branches 100% in sync I have used this procedure:

git merge -X theirs somebranch
git reset somebranch --hard

This will reset the state of the current branch to the HEAD of somebranch post merge. In some cases, you might also want to cleanup your working directory if it is dirty with uncommitted files, the whole procedure would then look like this:

git merge -X theirs somebranch
git reset somebranch --hard
git clean -f

Merging but overwriting changes in Git

3 Answers3

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