106

I've read all of the similar questions on this; it seems that none of the following have worked:

Delete offending files
git reset --hard HEAD
git stash
git pull

Nearly every combination, stashing changes and pulling from repository, results in unmergable files. I'd like to discard all local changes and just use the remote, but I cannot clone again (bandwidth and internet usage limitations with the developer trying to do this). How do I do this?

Just tried:

git stash
git pull

Also did not work.

More Info

There is one local commit, and the upstream has a commit as well. I've thus tried git pull --rebase but it's still not working properly... That gives me errors - "exiting because of an unresolved conflict". If I do git stash, git reset --hard HEAD, git pull --rebase, I get the error "pull is not possible, unmerged changes..."

Christian Stewart
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9 Answers9

234

Say the remote is origin and the branch is master, and say you already have master checked out, might try the following:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/master

This basically just takes the current branch and points it to the HEAD of the remote branch.

WARNING: As stated in the comments, this will throw away your local changes and overwrite with whatever is on the origin.

Or you can use the plumbing commands to do essentially the same:

git fetch <remote>
git update-ref refs/heads/<branch> $(git rev-parse <remote>/<branch>)
git reset --hard

EDIT: I'd like to briefly explain why this works.

The .git folder can hold the commits for any number of repositories. Since the commit hash is actually a verification method for the contents of the commit, and not just a randomly generated value, it is used to match commit sets between repositories.

A branch is just a named pointer to a given hash. Here's an example set:

$ find .git/refs -type f
.git/refs/tags/v3.8
.git/refs/heads/master
.git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
.git/refs/remotes/origin/master

Each of these files contains a hash pointing to a commit:

$ cat .git/refs/remotes/origin/master
d895cb1af15c04c522a25c79cc429076987c089b

These are all for the internal git storage mechanism, and work independently of the working directory. By doing the following:

git reset --hard origin/master

git will point the current branch at the same hash value that origin/master points to. Then it forcefully changes the working directory to match the file structure/contents at that hash.

To see this at work go ahead and try out the following:

git checkout -b test-branch
# see current commit and diff by the following
git show HEAD
# now point to another location
git reset --hard <remote>/<branch>
# see the changes again
git show HEAD
Aurelio
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Trevor Norris
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    From the recent approved edit adding the massive warning at the beginning, just like to point out that it's already mentioned: "Then [git] forcefully changes the working directory to match the file structure/contents at that hash." But guess that wasn't explicit enough. – Trevor Norris May 14 '14 at 22:28
10

I've had luck with 

git checkout -f <branch>

in a similar situation.

http://www.kernel.org/pub//software/scm/git/docs/git-checkout.html

Undo delete in GIT

Community
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salsbury
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9

Solved, using the following command set:

git reset --hard
git pull --rebase
git rebase --skip
git pull

The trick is to rebase the changes... We had some trouble rebasing one trivial commit, and so we simply skipped it using git rebase --skip (after having copied the files).

Christian Stewart
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6

If you ever happen to get this issue after running a git fetch and then git is not allowing you to run git pull because of a merge conflict (both modified / unmerged files, and to make you more frustrated, it won't show you any conflict markers in the file since it's not yet merged). If you do not wish to lose your work, you can do the following.

stage the file.

$ git add filename

then stash the local changes.

$ git stash

pull and update your working directory

$ git pull

restore your local modified file (git will automatically merge if it can, otherwise resolve it)

$ git stash pop

Hope it will help.

Nimeshka Srimal
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2

There is a solution even if you don't want to remove your local changes. Just fix the unmerged files (by git add or git remove). Then do git pull.

finefoot
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Preeti A.
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1

Assuming you want to throw away any changes you have, first check the output of git status. For any file that says "unmerged" next to it, run git add <unmerged file>. Then follow up with git reset --hard. That will git rid of any local changes except for untracked files.

Ryan Stewart
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  • Oh, right. It may not say "unmerged". It could also say "both modified" or maybe one or two other things. What's the output of `git status`? – Ryan Stewart Feb 28 '13 at 04:08
  • After posting this I'm telling the team member to try `git rebase --abort` and `git pull --rebase` as per the suggestion by git – Christian Stewart Feb 28 '13 at 04:12
1

I got solved with git remove the unmerged file locally.

$ git rm <the unmerged file name>
$ git reset --hard
$ git pull --rebase
$ git rebase --skip
$ git pull
Already up-to-date.

When I send git commit afterward:

$ git commit . -m "my send commit"
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working directory clean
eQ19
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0

Ryan Stewart's answer was almost there. In the case where you actually don't want to delete your local changes, there's a workflow you can use to merge:

  • Run git status. It will give you a list of unmerged files.
  • Merge them (by hand, etc.)
  • Run git commit

Git will commit just the merges into a new commit. (In my case, I had additional added files on disk, which weren't lumped into that commit.)

Git then considers the merge successful and allows you to move forward.

nightblade9
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0

Try find files that has merge conflicts:

git diff --name-status --diff-filter=U

Resolve conflict for files, than add this file to commit (even if file is deleted)

git add path/to/file.name

After this, if there is no merge conflict files, try to commit.

Eduard Brokan
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