Git could not unlink file during pull - how do I get out of inconsistent state of repository?

Question

While doing "git pull", git aborted the operation since it could not unlink a file it wanted to overwrite, because I forgot to close an application locked these files.

When I close the application and try to reexecute "git pull" and get the following error message:

"Error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: ..."

and

"Error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge: ..."

Clearly, git just aborted the pull without doing a roll-back and now thinks the changes that were just pulled are my local changes.

How do I get out of this state? We are talking about a lot of files, and before doing a "git revert" I would have to check manually for each file if there were some local changes from my side.

Note: we are using git in a client-server-like setup, where the distributed developers "pull" and "push&commit" frequently to a central bitbucket repository.

Answer 1

Since none of the above methods worked for me, I used a procedure that does is not fully automatic, but reduces the effort to a few manually selected files (in my case 2 instead of 50).

First stash all files (including untracked and ignored) using

git stash save --all             

Then redo the pull, that previously failed, using

git pull                         

Now checkout from the stash to simply overwrite all files, that were changed during the first pull (no merge attempt):

git checkout stash -- .         

Now one problem is left: changes that were made on the server between the failed pull and the second pull are now overwritten. But those should be only a few files (if the time between the two 'pull' was short), and much more easy to identify in the list of working changes you made yourself. Simply "revert" them (I used the Tortoise GIT commit dialog) before doing the final commit.

git commit
git stash drop