Git Pull is Not Possible, Unmerged Files

I've read all of the similar questions on this; it seems that none of the following have worked:

Delete offending files
git reset --hard HEAD
git stash
git pull

Nearly every combination, stashing changes and pulling from repository, results in unmergable files. I'd like to discard all local changes and just use the remote, but I cannot clone again (bandwidth and internet usage limitations with the developer trying to do this). How do I do this?

Just tried:

git stash
git pull

Also did not work.

More Info

There is one local commit, and the upstream has a commit as well. I've thus tried git pull --rebase but it's still not working properly... That gives me errors - "exiting because of an unresolved conflict". If I do git stash, git reset --hard HEAD, git pull --rebase, I get the error "pull is not possible, unmerged changes..."

Say the remote is origin and the branch is master, and say you already have master checked out, might try the following:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/master

This basically just takes the current branch and points it to the HEAD of the remote branch.

WARNING: As stated in the comments, this will throw away your local changes and overwrite with whatever is on the origin.

Or you can use the plumbing commands to do essentially the same:

git fetch <remote>
git update-ref refs/heads/<branch> $(git rev-parse <remote>/<branch>)
git reset --hard

EDIT: I'd like to briefly explain why this works.

The .git folder can hold the commits for any number of repositories. Since the commit hash is actually a verification method for the contents of the commit, and not just a randomly generated value, it is used to match commit sets between repositories.

A branch is just a named pointer to a given hash. Here's an example set:

$ find .git/refs -type f
.git/refs/tags/v3.8
.git/refs/heads/master
.git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
.git/refs/remotes/origin/master

Each of these files contains a hash pointing to a commit:

$ cat .git/refs/remotes/origin/master
d895cb1af15c04c522a25c79cc429076987c089b

These are all for the internal git storage mechanism, and work independently of the working directory. By doing the following:

git reset --hard origin/master

git will point the current branch at the same hash value that origin/master points to. Then it forcefully changes the working directory to match the file structure/contents at that hash.

To see this at work go ahead and try out the following:

git checkout -b test-branch
# see current commit and diff by the following
git show HEAD
# now point to another location
git reset --hard <remote>/<branch>
# see the changes again
git show HEAD

I've had luck with

git checkout -f <branch>

in a similar situation.

http://www.kernel.org/pub//software/scm/git/docs/git-checkout.html

Undo delete in GIT

Solved, using the following command set:

git reset --hard
git pull --rebase
git rebase --skip
git pull

The trick is to rebase the changes... We had some trouble rebasing one trivial commit, and so we simply skipped it using git rebase --skip (after having copied the files).

If you ever happen to get this issue after running a git fetch and then git is not allowing you to run git pull because of a merge conflict (both modified / unmerged files, and to make you more frustrated, it won't show you any conflict markers in the file since it's not yet merged). If you do not wish to lose your work, you can do the following.

stage the file.

$ git add filename

then stash the local changes.

$ git stash

pull and update your working directory

$ git pull

restore your local modified file (git will automatically merge if it can, otherwise resolve it)

$ git stash pop

Hope it will help.