[git] What is the meaning of git reset --hard origin/master?

I did a git pull and got an error:

The following working tree files would be overwritten by merge... Please move or remove them before you can merge.

To resolve this I did the following:

git fetch
git reset --hard origin/master

Now when I do git pull, it says everything up to date. I want to know what exactly happens when I run these commands. I know git fetch fetches the changes from the remote repo without merging them into my local repo.

What is the meaning of git reset --hard origin/master? How does it work?

This question is related to git version-control git-reset

The answer is


git reset --hard origin/master

says: throw away all my staged and unstaged changes, forget everything on my current local branch and make it exactly the same as origin/master.

You probably wanted to ask this before you ran the command. The destructive nature is hinted at by using the same words as in "hard reset".


In newer version of git (2.23+) you can use:

git switch -C master origin/master

-C is same as --force-create. Related Reference Docs


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