error on intial pull

[Edgardo Beltran]

on an initial pull on a branch i am getting this error:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge:

list of file...

[KieranA]

Hi Edgardo,

This means that you have a file in your working copy that is untracked which also exists as a tracked file in the branch you're just about to merge. In your case Git doesn't know what to do as it doesn't want to overwrite files you might need. Your options are:

1. Delete the file which is causing the merge error if you don't need it
2. Rename it if you don't want to merge it with any other files from the merge
3. Commit it in your working copy so you can merge it later

Basically, Git doesn't like to delete files unnecessarily so will want you to address the problem yourself before doing the merge. The error message does tell you which files are causing the problem so this should be pretty easy to fix.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask more questions if needed.