Error linking git to homebrew [duplicate]

Question

I'm following Luke Jones' article on setting up a local server, and I'm currently trying to set up homebrew with git on Mavericks. I already had git installed before installing homebrew. I'm having an issue that seemed similar to this question but when I tried running brew link git I received the following error:

Error: Could not symlink file: /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.8.5.1/share/git-core/templates/info/exclude
Target /usr/local/share/git-core/templates/info/exclude already exists. You may need to delete it.
To force the link and overwrite all other conflicting files, do:
  brew link --overwrite formula_name

To list all files that would be deleted:
  brew link --overwrite --dry-run formula_name

My /etc/paths:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

which git returns /usr/bin/git

which brew returns /usr/local/bin/brew

Not sure what the issue is, as I'm still not great at finding my way around things like this. Anyone know next steps to take?

Answer 1

For others having an issue in the future:

I have git linked with homebrew now. I had the Mac Github client installed which may have been making some files unwriteable (this post tipped me off), so I uninstalled that with AppCleaner, restarted my terminal, uninstalled all versions of git, ran sudo brew prune to clean things up, and reinstalled git through brew with brew install git. Then I ran brew link git and it worked just fine.

I'm sure someone else might have a better explanation of what happened, and some of these steps might have been overkill, but it worked for me!

Answer 2

Try overriding the links as suggested in the error message:

 brew link --overwrite git

You may add --dry-run to check it first before doing any changes.