git pull displays "fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/xxxx" and hangs up

Question

I created a branch called '6796', then I pushed it to remote, checked it out on another machine, made other edits, pushed it, then merged it with the master, and deleted it - locally and remotely (git push :6796) - on the other machine. Now, when I run git pull:

fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/6796 user@host:~/path/to/repo$ fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly 

but git pull origin master works normally. It seems to me that there is some 6796 reference hang up... how to resolve this?

Answer 1

There are probably some commands to resolve it, but I would start by looking in your .git/config file for references to that branch, and removing them.