git checkout master error: the following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout

git git-checkout
Fei Xue picture Fei Xue · Aug 1, 2013 · Viewed 151.8k times · Source

I have a git repository. It has A B C D E ... commits. Now I want to checkout D as a new branch named Dbranch. So I excute:git checkout D -b Dbranch. And now I want to delete this branch. Firstly I need to switch to master branch , and then use git branch -d Dbranch to delete it. But when I excute git checkout master, it gives me the error. 

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
    source/a/foo.c
        ...... (too many lines)
Please move or remove them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

How to delete the Dbranch?

Answer

dekdev picture dekdev · Nov 5, 2013

Try git checkout -f master.

-f or --force

Source: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-checkout.html

When switching branches, proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. This is used to throw away local changes.

When checking out paths from the index, do not fail upon unmerged entries; instead, unmerged entries are ignored.

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