Force git to overwrite local files on pull.

Question

The scenario is following:

• my team member is modifying the templates for a website we are working on
• he is adding some images to the images directory (but forgets to add them under source control)
• he is sending later the images by mail to me
• i'm adding the images under the source control and push them to github together with other changes
• he cannot pull updates from github because git doesn't want to overwrite his files.

the erros i'm getting are:

error: Untracked working tree file 'public/images/icon.gif' would be overwritten by merge.

How to force git to overwrite them? The guy is designer - usually i resolve all the conflicts by hand so on the server is the most recent version that he just need to update on his computer.

Answer 1

It looks like the best way is to first do:

git clean

To delete all untracked files and then continue with usual git pull....

Answer 2

Try this:

git reset --hard HEAD
git pull

Should do what you want.

Answer 3

You might find this command helpful to throw away local changes

git checkout <your-branch> -f

and then do a clean up

git clean -f