Cleaning up after a conflicted git merge?

Question

I had a small conflict in a .h header file in a project I'm working on. This project is tracked in Git.

Fortunately, the conflict was very simple to solve. I used

git mergetool

And chose the default (opendiff) which seemed to be FileMerge on my Mac. I made the appropriate changes, saved the file, and closed.

Git then asked me if the merge was successful, I said yes:

Was the merge successful? [y/n] y

But now, I have:

> git st # On branch develop # Changes to be committed: #   modified:   MyHeader.h # # Untracked files: #   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) # #   MyHeader.h.BACKUP.52920.h #   MyHeader.h.BASE.52920.h #   MyHeader.h.LOCAL.52920.h #   MyHeader.h.REMOTE.52920.h #   MyHeader.h.orig 

Which of those extra junk conflict files were created by FileMerge, and which by Git?

And more importantly: How do I remove them?

Answer 1

You can simply delete them like you would any other file. For example:

rm MyHeader.h.orig 

Alternatively, if there are no other untracked files, then after you commit with

git commit -a 

you may clean your repository with

git clean -n git clean -f 

git clean -n will tell you what git clean -f will do, so you can be sure it's what you want.

Answer 2

If they are the only untracked files, you can use git clean to delete them. Run it once with the -n flag to see what will be deleted then if you are sure, run it with -f. Don't use it if you have untracked files you want to keep!