Git refusing to merge because of changes to an unchanged file

Question

I'm having a git problem where I want to merge a branch into master but it's refusing to merge because it thinks I have local changes to a file. Doing status shows no changes and diffing the files produces nothing. Here's the terminal output:

$ git checkout ProductsAndContents
Switched to branch 'ProductsAndContents'

$ git status
# On branch ProductsAndContents
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

$ git merge ProductsAndContents
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
    tests/unit/src/models/BrandTests.js
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.
Aborting

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated!

Answer 1

Thanks to Andrew Myers' comment on my initial question, I discovered setting core.trustctime to false solved the problem.

git config core.trustctime false

Something about mismatching inode change times. I'm guessing this is because the repo is sitting on a fileshare on a machine with a different file system from the one I'm using.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Answer 2

Well, if you're confident you won't loose any work, try the following:

rm tests/unit/src/models/BrandTests.js
git checkout -- tests/unit/src/models/BrandTests.js

That should reset any mechanism that made it think it had changes. If it doesn't work, have others that might.