Preventing a file overwrite with Git

Question

my company started recently to use Git for source version control, and due to the incompetence of the coders - that's me and my boss :-P - we have a really nice spaghetti of files being overwritten here and there.
Is there a way to mark certain files as 'untouchable' so if when updating a branch from another either do(es)n't overwrite the file(s) or doesn't do the update at all?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can do exactly what you're asking for with hooks, but I don't know if that solves your real problem.

If it's as simple as your in-progress files getting munged, that's easy: Never pull/merge/rebase with uncommitted changes. Always commit before bringing in any other code.