Ok, so I had been working on something, and decided it was completely screwed -- after having committed some of it. So I tried the following sequence:
git reset --hard
git rebase origin
git fetch
git pull
git checkout
At which point I got the message
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.
I want to get rid of my local commits, without having to wipe out my local directory and redownload everything. How can I accomplish that?
$ git reset --hard origin/master
will remove all commits not in origin/master.
As an aside, apart from the answer by mipadi (which should work by the way), you should know that doing:
git branch -D master
git checkout master
also does exactly what you want without having to redownload everything (your quote paraphrased). That is because your local repo contains a copy of the remote repo (and that copy is not the same as your local directory, it is not even the same as your checked out branch).
Wiping out a branch is perfectly safe and reconstructing that branch is very fast and involves no network traffic. Remember, git is primarily a local repo by design. Even remote branches have a copy on the local. There's only a bit of metadata that tells git that a specific local copy is actually a remote branch. In git, all files are on your hard disk all the time.