Why is the working directory of master not clean after pull?

Question

When I was on a feature branch Feature123 in my local repository, i created a commit, and pushed it to github:

$ git commit -m "Feature123 add unit tests"
[Feature123 53ad59a] Feature123 add unit tests
2 files changed, 94 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

$ git push origin Feature123
Counting objects: 10, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (9/9), done.
Writing objects: 100% (10/10), 1.23 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 10 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (8/8), completed with 8 local objects.
To https://github-repo-url
93f285a..53ad59a  Feature123 -> Feature123

On GitHub, I saw there is merge conflict when merging the feature branch to a branch called master, so I had to solve the conflict locally.

1. I first switch to master and pull:

   $ git checkout master
   Switched to branch 'master'
   Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'
   
   $ git pull
   remote: Counting objects: 931, done.
   remote: Compressing objects: 100% (307/307), done.
   remote: Total 931 (delta 634), reused 473 (delta 471), pack-reused 132
   Receiving objects: 100% (931/931), 707.48 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
   Resolving deltas: 100% (683/683), completed with 329 local objects.
   From https://github-repo-url
   e30f5fd..64f0158  master    -> origin/master
   12a9754..ab3ff99  B01312     -> origin/B01312
   bbbb9cc..d729e42  B02481_6   -> origin/B02481_6
   * [new branch]      B02523     -> origin/B02523
   550ca90..760be6b  B03395     -> origin/B03395
   fd54149..2559131  B03616     -> origin/B03616
   Updating e30f5fd..64f0158
   error: unable to create file dir1/file1: Permission denied
   error: unable to create file dir2/file2: Permission denied
   Checking out files: 100% (469/469), done.
   

   What do the error messages "error: unable to create file dir1/file1: Permission denied" mean?

2. Then i wanted to switch to the feature branch, and merge, but

   $ git checkout Feature123
   error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
   dir3/file3
   dir4/file4
   Please commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches.
   Aborting
   

   Why is the working directory of master not clean, given that I have committed on my feature branch?

   What shall I do now to merge master into my feature branch?

Answer 1

First, make sure a git checkout -- . does work. If you still see "unable to create file... Permission denied" error, this is generally do to:

• a permission issue as in here
• a running application preempting the files

Regarding your second checkout, you can either stash your local changes, or remove everything with git clean -ndx (remove the -n for the actual clean)