gitignore and The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout

Question

So I added a folder to my  gitignore file   Once I do a git status it tells me    On branch latest nothing to commit  working directory clean    However  when I try to change branches I get the following   My-MacBook-Pro webapp marcamillion  git checkout develop error  The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout      public system images 9 thumb red-stripe jpg     public system images 9 original red-stripe jpg     public system images 8 thumb red-stripe-red jpg     public system images 8 original red-stripe-red jpg     public system images 8 original 00-louis c k -chewed up-cover-2008 jpg     public system images 7 thumb red-stripe-dark jpg     public system images 7 original red-stripe-dark jpg     public system images 7 original DSC07833 JPG     public system images 6 thumb red-stripe-bw jpg     public system images 6 original website-logo png     public system images 6 original red-stripe-bw jpg     public system images 5 thumb Guy Waving Jamaican Flag jpg     public system images 5 original logocompv-colored-squares-100px png     public system images 5 original Guy Waving Jamaican Flag jpg     public system images 4 thumb DSC 0001 JPG     public system images 4 original logo png     public system images 4 original DSC 0001 JPG     public system images 4 original 2-up jpg     public system images 3 thumb logo2 gif     public system images 3 original logo2 gif     public system images 3 original Guy Waving Jamaican Flag jpg     public system images 3 original 11002000962 jpg     public system images 2 thumb Profile Pic jpg     public system images 2 original Profile Pic jpg     public system images 2 original 02 Login Screen jpg     public system images 1 original Argentina-2010-World-Cup jpg Please move or remove them before you can switch branches  Aborting   This is what my  gitignore file looks like    bundle  DS Store db   sqlite3 log   log tmp      public system images   public system avatars     How do I get this working so I can switch branches without deleting those files   If I make a change  will it affect those files  In other words  if I came back to this branch afterwards would everything be perfect as up to my latest commit   I don t want to lose those files  I just don t want them tracked

User · Answer

For those who need something less far-reaching than Scott Schafer’s answer,

git clean -f

will likely work. I highly suggest running

git clean --dry-run

first. That command will output a list of files that Git will remove if you run git clean -f, and might save you the pain of inadvertently removing something you didn’t want to.

See this Stack Oveflow answer or the docs for more information on git clean.

User · Answer

I had the same problem when checking out to a branch based on an earlier commit  Git refused to checkout because of untracked files   I ve found a solution and I hope it will help you too   Adding the affected directories to  gitignore and issuing   git rm -r --cached on them is apparently not enough    Assume you want to make a branch based an earlier commit K to test some stuff and come back to the current version  I would do it in the following steps    Setup the untracked files   edit the  gitignore and apply   git rm -r --cached on the files and directories you want the git to ignore  Add also the file  gitignore itself to  gitignoreand don t forget to issue   git rm -r --cached  gitignore  This will ensure the the ignore behavior of git leaves the same in the earlier commits  Commit the changes you just made     git add -A   git commit  Save the current log  otherwise you may get problems coming back to the current version    git log  gt     git log Hard reset to the commit K     git reset --hard version k Create a branch based on the commit K    git branch commit k branch Checkout into that branch    git checkout commit k branch     Do your stuff and commit it Checkout back into master again    git checkout master Reset to the current Version again    git reset current version or   git reset ORIG HEAD Now you can reset hard to the HEAD  git reset --hard HEAD   NOTE  Do not skip the next-to-last step  like e  g    git reset --hard ORIG HEAD   otherwise the untracked files git complained above will get lost   I also made sure the files git complained about were not deleted  I copied them to a text-file and issued the command   for i in   cat    test txt   do ls -ahl  i  done  If you checkout to the branch mentioned above again  do not forget to issue   git status to ensure no unwanted changes appear

User · Answer

In my case git rm --cached didn t work  But i got it with a git rebase

User · Answer

Unfortunately neither git rm --cached or git clean  -d  -fx    did it for me   My solution ended up being pushing my branch to remote  cloning a new repo  then doing my merge in the new repo  Other people accessing the repo had to do the same   Moral of the story  use a  gitignore file from inception

User · Answer

If you have renamed a file locally and then do a pull  it will display that error message

User · Answer

A simple solution might be   Just make sure that you are in the correct working directory in GitBash  That Message occure almost every time if a User tries to merge a directory too high in his folder hierarchy    Example    workspace git myBashSourceFolder myProjectSourcefolder   Scenario  User cloned repo in git-folder he created a new Java Project in Eclipse  imported the cloned repo  Eclipse set myProjectSourceFolder as Source Folder in his local Project  therefore the User entered it in git bash and pushed  pulled and commited his project from there  git syncs therefore myProjectSourceFolder - but has no record in his history for myBashSourceFolder  Therefore a push   pull  merge from myBashSourceFolder will produce the given output  if User tries to sync from there next time  instead of the folder he worked before      Solution  Enter correct Folder and try a pull again  In almost every   time I encountered  this solution worked fine

User · Answer

If you re on OS X  it may be because a file s name has had certain characters change case  Try setting the following config option   git config core ignorecase true

User · Answer

This happened to me on a Windows 8 system  using Git from the command prompt   The rest of my team uses TFS  and I use Microsoft s git-tf to push pull between TFS and my local Git repository   The problem arose due to some files that had been renamed only to change their case   What appears to have happened was this    The files were checked in with mixed casing in their names  In a later commit  the file names were changed to all lower-case  git-tf initially got the files in mixed case  When the files were renamed to lower-case  git-tf didn t get the files because to Windows 8 those file names are equivalent  Since Git is case-sensitive  it complained that I had the mixed-case files that weren t in source control   But using git status  I couldn t see any changes  since in the Windows command prompt those file names are equivalent    The simplest solution for me was    git checkout a previous version of the project  well before those files were ever added  Then git checkout the latest version of the project  with the correct file casing

User · Answer

This worked for me    1  git fetch --all  2  git reset --hard origin  branch name

User · Answer

I was also facing a similar issue and i tried all the solutions posted above but it didn t work  The issue was caused when i renamed my onMusicUpdateListener java to OnMusicUpdateListener java in develop branch    Now master had onMusicUpdateListener java and develop had the same file as OnMusicUpdateListener java  Now whenever i switched to master it gave me an error  The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout   and then it aborted   In order to solve this  i forcefully checked out master branch and then renamed my onMusicUpdateListener java to OnMusicUpdateListener java  committed it and then merged it with develop branch   Then i updated my develop branch by merging it into master and now everything is back to normal and problem is solved

User · Answer

It seems like you want the files ignored but they have already been commited   gitignore has no effect on files that are already in the repo so they need to be removed with git rm --cached  The --cached will prevent it from having any effect on your working copy and it will just mark as removed the next time you commit  After the files are removed from the repo then the  gitignore will prevent them from being added again   But you have another problem with your  gitignore  you are excessively using wildcards and its causing it to match less than you expect it to  Instead lets change the  gitignore and try this    bundle  DS Store db   sqlite3 log   log tmp  public system images  public system avatars

User · Answer

There is a command for this delicate task  permanently deleting untracked files   git clean -i   Then git pull will do

User · Answer

In order to save the modified files and to use the modified content later  I found this error while i try checking out a branch and when trying to rebase  Try Git stash   git stash

User · Answer

Move files  instead of delete  One way of avoiding deleting files is to move them instead  For example   cd   git rev-parse --show-toplevel   git checkout 2 gt  amp 1   while read f  do     -e   f       mv   f    f  bak  done

User · Answer

Check if any folder name having     or any special symbol then rename that folders  Then you just clone the repository to another location

User · Answer

In my case  I was seeing this error because I am using a popular open source CMS and the directory which was causing issues was the uploads directory which the CMS writes to   So what it was saying is that there are files which you don t have  but which you can t get from versioning   I m grabbing all the files from the live site to my local  then I ll check this into the repo in the hope that this fixes the issue

User · Answer

In my case  the problem was with the submodules  master was merged with another branch which added a new submodule to the project  The branch I was trying to checkout didn t have it  that s why git was complaining about untracked files and none of the other suggested solutions worked for me  I forced the checkout to my new branch  and pulled master    git checkout -f my branch git pull origin master git submodule update --init

User · Answer

I just went to the file system and deleted the file directly  then continued with git checkout and it worked   I ve had the problem occur several times and it may be related to developers doing delete  push  re-add  push or some such thing

User · Answer

Just delete the files or rename them   e g      git pull Enter passphrase for key   c Users PC983  ssh id rsa   error  Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge          ajax productPrice php Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge  error  The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge          ajax product php Please move or remove them before you merge  Aborting Updating a04cbe7a  6aa8ead5   I had to rename delete ajax product php and ajax produtPrice php   Don t worry  git pull will bring them back  I suggest you to rename them instead of deleting  because you might loose some changes   If this does not help  then you have to delete the whole Branch and create it again and then do git pull origin remotebranch

User · Answer

that s easy to solve  git is saying that you have the same files in both branches  therefore you have to delete the specific files from master branch and then you will be able to merge   git merge  your branch    I hope it works for you  I just solved my error  my error was   error  The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge           vs slnx sqlite Please move or remove them before you merge  Aborting   Now it is working  In my case  vs slnx sqlite was generated by visual studio  I needed to close it before delete it

User · Answer

These two functions   git rm --cached git checkout -f another-branch     did NOT work for me   Instead  I physically removed the file  in eclipse  as what Git tells you to do    Please move or remove them before you can switch branches    and then I add committed it   and then I pulled and it worked

User · Answer

2 files with the same name but different case might be the issue   You can Delete one on these files or rename it  Ex   Pdf html twig  The GOOD one   pdf html twig  The one I deleted

User · Answer

Git is telling you that it wants to create files  named public system images 9     etc   but you already have existing files in that directory that aren t tracked by Git  Perhaps somebody else added those files to the Git repository  and this is the first time you have switched to that branch   There s probably a reason why those files in your develop branch but not in your current branch  You may have to ask your collaborators why that is      how do I get this working so I can switch branches without deleting those files    You can t do it without making the files disappear somehow  You could rename public to my public or something for now      if I came back to this branch afterwards would everything be perfect as up to my latest commit    If you commit your changes  Git won t lose them  If you don t commit your changes  then Git will try really hard not to overwrite work that you have done  That s what Git is warning you about in the first instance here  when you tried to switch branches

User · Answer

If you want to quickly resolve this question You can use this command   git checkout -f dev

User · Answer

This could be a permission issue   change the ownership   sudo chown -v -R usr-name group-name folder-name

User · Answer

Most of the answers consider deleting or removing the files  which is the easy way  But sometimes you don t want to get rid of the local files  But merge with a strategy  so git has solution for this too    git merge --strategy ours master

User · Answer

WARNING  it will delete untracked files  so it s not a great answer to the question being posed   I hit this message as well  In my case  I didn t want to keep the files  so this worked for me   git 2 11 and newer  git clean  -d  -f     older git  git clean  -d  -f      If you also want to remove files ignored by git  then execute the following command    BE WARNED    THIS MOST PROBABLY DESTROYS YOUR PROJECT  USE ONLY IF YOU KNOW 100  WHAT YOU ARE DOING  git 2 11 and newer  git clean  -d  -fx     older git  git clean  -d  -fx      http   www kernel org pub software scm git docs git-clean html   -x means ignored files are also removed as well as files unknown to git  -d means remove untracked directories in addition to untracked files   -f is required to force it to run

User · Answer

Delete  gitignore file from appname gen  to solve this issue

User · Answer

Warning  This will delete the local files that are not indexed   Just force it   git checkout -f another-branch

[git] .gitignore and "The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout"

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-merge

Examples related to gitignore