The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge but I don t care

Question

On my branch I had some files in  gitignore  On a different branch those files are not   I want to merge the different branch into mine  and I don t care if those files are no longer ignored or not   Unfortunately I get this       The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge   How would I modify my pull command to overwrite those files  without me having to find  move or delete those files myself

User · Accepted Answer

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.

Try running

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.

User · Answer

The problem is when we have incoming changes that will merge untracked file  git complains  These commands helped me   git clean -dxf git pull origin master

User · Answer

You can try that command   git clean -df

User · Answer

Neither clean reset hard checkout rebase worked for me    So I just removed files that git complained about   rm  path to files that git complained about    I checked if this files can be removed by checking out a brand new repo in a separate folder  files were not there

User · Answer

If you consider using the -f flag you might first run it as a dry-run  Just that you know upfront what kind of interesting situation you will end up next  -P  -n  --dry-run      Don   t actually remove anything  just show what would be done

User · Answer

One way to do this is by stashing you local changes and pulling from the remote repo  In this way  you will not lose your local files as the files will go to the stash    git add -A git stash git pull   You can check your local stashed files using this command - git stash list

User · Answer

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    Here is the link that can be helpful as well

User · Answer

If you have the files written under  gitignore  remove the files and run git pull again  That helped me out

User · Answer

For those who don t know  git ignores uppercase lowercase name differences in files and folders   This turns out to be a nightmare when you rename them to the exact same name with a different case   I encountered this issue when I renamed a folder from  Petstore  to  petstore   uppercase to lowercase    I had edited my  git config file to stop ignoring case  made changes  squashed my commits  and stashed my changes to move to a different branch  I could not apply my stashed changes to this other branch   The fix that I found that worked was to temporarily edit my  git config file to temporarily ignore case again   This caused git stash apply to succeed   Then  I changed ignoreCase back to false   I then added everything except for the new files in the petstore folder which git oddly claimed were deleted  for whatever reason   I committed my changes  then ran git reset --hard HEAD to get rid of those untracked new files   My commit appeared exactly as expected  the files in the folder were renamed   I hope that this helps you avoid my same nightmare

User · Answer

The only commands that worked for me were   git fetch --all git reset --hard origin   your branch name

User · Answer

Remove all untracked files  git clean  -d  -fx    Caution  this will delete IDE files and any useful files as long as you donot track the files  Use this command with care

User · Answer

A replacement for git merge that will overwrite untracked files  The comments below use  FOI  for the  files of interest   the files that   exist in the donor branch  do not exist in the receiving branch  and are blocking the merge because they are present and untracked in your working directory    git checkout -f donor-branch     replace FOI with tracked  donor  versions git checkout receiving-branch    FOI are not in  receiving   so they disapppear git merge donor-branch    now the merge works   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    Detailed explanation  git merge -f does not exist  but git checkout -f does   We will use git checkout -f   git checkout to remove the Files Of Interest  see above   and then your merge can proceed normally   Step 1  This step forcibly replaces untracked FOI with tracked versions of the donor branch  it also checks out the donor branch  and updates the rest of the working dir    git checkout -f donor-branch   Step 2  This step removes the FOI because they they are tracked in our current  donor  branch  and absent in the receiving-branch we switch to   git checkout receiving-branch   Step 3  Now that the FOI are absent  merging in the donor branch will not overwrite any untracked files  so we get no errors   git merge donor-branch

User · Answer

Update - a better version  This tool  https   github com mklepaczewski git-clean-before-merge  will    delete untracked files that are identical to their git pull equivalents  revert changes to modified files who s modified version is identical to their git pull equivalents  report modified untracked files that differ from their git pull version  the tool has the --pretend option that will not modify any files    Old version  How this answer differ from other answers   The method presented here removes only files that would be overwritten by merge  If you have other untracked  possibly ignored  files in the directory this method won t remove them   The solution  This snippet will extract all untracked files that would be overwritten by git pull and delete them    git pull 2 gt  amp 1 grep -E    s  cut -f2- xargs -I    rm -rf        and then just do   git pull   This is not git porcelain command so always double check what it would do with   git pull 2 gt  amp 1 grep -E    s  cut -f2- xargs -I    echo        Explanation - because one liners are scary   Here s a breakdown of what it does    git pull 2 gt  amp 1 - capture git pull output and redirect it all to stdout so we can easily capture it with grep  grep -E    s - the intent is to capture the list of the untracked files that would be overwritten by git pull  The filenames have a bunch of whitespace characters in front of them so we utilize it to get them  cut -f2- - remove whitespace from the beginning of each line captured in 2  xargs -I    rm -rf      - us xargs to iterate over all files  save their name in      and call rm for each of them  We use -rf to force delete and remove untracked directories    It would be great to replace steps 1-3 with porcelain command  but I m not aware of any equivalent

User · Answer

In my case when I had this problem  I had a local file that I had renamed on the remote   When trying to git pull Git told me the new filename was not tracked -- which it was on the remote although it didn t yet exist on local   Because there was no instance of it locally I couldn t do git pull until I did git rm on the old filename  which wasn t obvious at first because of my stupid idea of renaming it

User · Answer

In addition to the accepted answer you can of course remove the files if they are no longer needed by specifying the file   git clean -f   path to file     Remember to run it with the -n flag first if you would like to see which files git clean will remove  Note that these files will be deleted  In my case I didn t care about them anyway  so that was a better solution for me

User · Answer

If this is a one-time operation  you could just remove all untracked files from the working directory before doing the pull  Read How to remove local  untracked  files from the current Git working tree  for information on how to remove all untracked files   Be sure to not accidentally remove untracked file that you still need

[git] The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge, but I don't care

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