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 t

Answer 1

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