How do I ignore an error on 'git pull' about my local changes would be overwritten by merge?

Question

How do I ignore the following error message on Git pull?

Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge

What if I want to overwrite them?

I've tried things like git pull -f, but nothing works.

To be clear, I only want to overwrite specific changes, not everything.

Answer 1

If you want remove all local changes - including files that are untracked by git - from your working copy, simply stash them:

git stash push --include-untracked

If you don't need them anymore, you now can drop that stash:

git stash drop

If you don't want to stash changes that you already staged - e.g. with git add - then add the option --keep-index. Note however, that this will still prevent merging if those staged changes collide with the ones from upstream.

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If you want to overwrite only specific parts of your local changes, there are two possibilities:

1. Commit everything you don't want to overwrite and use the method above for the rest.

2. Use git checkout path/to/file/to/revert for the changes you wish to overwrite. Make sure that file is not staged via git reset HEAD path/to/file/to/revert.