Git merge is not possible because I have unmerged files

Issue

git continues to confuse me with its unhelpful error warnings This one really deserves a prize:

git merge is not possible because you have unmerged files

My situation: My master branch on github was edited (directly in the browser) while my local master branch was also edited.

I wrongly suppose you could simply merge the two versions and be done with it, but also, I cannot merge – because my files are unmerged.

git merge remote/master

results in

error: merge is not possible because you have unmerged files.
hint: Fix them up in the work tree, and then use 'git add/rm <file>'
hint: as appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit.
fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.

So, after adding and committing the local change and then trying to merge again, I get:

merge: remote/master - not something we can merge

Clearly I am missing something essential here… Do I have the wrong idea about what merging means? How do I fix this issue of having a different remote master / local master branch?

Solution

The error message:

merge: remote/master – not something we can merge

is saying that Git doesn’t recognize remote/master. This is probably because you don’t have a “remote” named “remote”. You have a “remote” named “origin”.

Think of “remotes” as an alias for the url to your Git server. master is your locally checked-out version of the branch. origin/master is the latest version of master from your Git server that you have fetched (downloaded). A fetch is always safe because it will only update the “origin/x” version of your branches.

So, to get your master branch back in sync, first download the latest content from the git server:

git fetch

Then, perform the merge:

git merge origin/master

…But, perhaps the better approach would be:

git pull origin master

The pull command will do the fetch and merge for you in one step.

Answered By – Jonathan.Brink

This Answer collected from stackoverflow, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5 , cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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