Error on pod install

Question

I have a working project the uses a pod file for some weeks now. When I learned that some of my pods have update I tried to 'pod install' on got this weird error

    Analyzing dependencies     [!] Pod::Executable pull      Updating 1337455..e9f6e93     error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge:  AeroGear-Push/0.7.0/AeroGear-Push.podspec  AeroGear/1.2.0/AeroGear.podspec  BrynKit/1.3.0/BrynKit.podspec  BrynKit/1.3.1/BrynKit.podspec  CSURITemplate/0.3/CSURITemplate.podspec  EXiLE/1.0.2/EXiLE.podspec  FlurrySDK/4.2.3/FlurrySDK.podspec  FoundationExtension/0.39.1/FoundationExtension.podspec  FoundationExtension/0.39/FoundationExtension.podspec  GCDObjects/0.0.1/GCDObjects.podspec  HTAutocompleteTextField/1.2.1/HTAutocompleteTextField.podspec  HTAutocompleteTextField/1.2.2/HTAutocompleteTextField.podspec  HTAutocompleteTextField/1.2/HTAutocompleteTextField.podspec  IDMPhotoBrowser/1.1.2/IDMPhotoBrowser.podspec  Igor/0.5.0/Igor.podspec  KFOpenWeatherMapAPI/0.2.0/KFOpenWeatherMapAPI.podspec  NGSegmentedViewController/0.1.1/NGSegmentedViewController.podspec  PPiFlatSegmentedControl/1.3/PPiFlatSegmentedControl.podspec  PiwikTracker/2.0.0/PiwikTracker.podspec  SDWebImage/3.4/SDWebImage.podspec  libwbxml/0.11.2/libwbxml.podspec  wbxml/0.0.1/wbxml.podspec      Please move or remove them before you can merge.      Aborting 

another post suggested using the 'rm -rf ~/.cocoapods' command line but this caused my cocoapods to stop working all together for all project now which ever project I try to 'pod install' I get the 'Unable to find a specification for..' error

[!] Unable to find a specification for CorePlot (= 1.3).

Answer 1

If you landed here on or after January 30th 2014, there is a break in CocoaPods causing this. Please read the related blog post found here: http://blog.cocoapods.org/Repairing-Our-Broken-Specs-Repository/

or do:

pod repo remove master pod setup 

Answer 2

solved it on my own the trick was to use $sudo rm -rf ~/.cocoapods to clean the cocoapods master repo and then pod install worked without any problems.

hope this helps other people whom encountered this issue