Another way to make a directory stay (almost) empty (in the repository) is to create a .gitignore
file inside that directory that contains these four lines:
# Ignore everything in this directory
*
# Except this file
!.gitignore
Then you don't have to get the order right the way that you have to do in m104's solution.
This also gives the benefit that files in that directory won't show up as "untracked" when you do a git status.
Making @GreenAsJade's comment persistent:
I think it's worth noting that this solution does precisely what the question asked for, but is not perhaps what many people looking at this question will have been looking for. This solution guarantees that the directory remains empty. It says "I truly never want files checked in here". As opposed to "I don't have any files to check in here, yet, but I need the directory here, files may be coming later".
Try: git mergetool
It opens a GUI that steps you through each conflict, and you get to choose how to merge. Sometimes it requires a bit of hand editing afterwards, but usually it's enough by itself. It is much better than doing the whole thing by hand certainly.
As per Josh Glover's comment:
The command
doesn't necessarily open a GUI unless you install one. Running git mergetool
for me resulted in vimdiff
being used. You can install
one of the following tools to use it instead: meld
, opendiff
,
kdiff3
, tkdiff
, xxdiff
, tortoisemerge
, gvimdiff
, diffuse
,
ecmerge
, p4merge
, araxis
, vimdiff
, emerge
.
Below is the sample procedure to use vimdiff
for resolve merge conflicts. Based on this link
Step 1: Run following commands in your terminal
git config merge.tool vimdiff
git config merge.conflictstyle diff3
git config mergetool.prompt false
This will set vimdiff as the default merge tool.
Step 2: Run following command in terminal
git mergetool
Step 3: You will see a vimdiff display in following format
╔═══════╦══════╦════════╗
║ ║ ║ ║
║ LOCAL ║ BASE ║ REMOTE ║
║ ║ ║ ║
╠═══════╩══════╩════════╣
║ ║
║ MERGED ║
║ ║
╚═══════════════════════╝
These 4 views are
LOCAL – this is file from the current branch
BASE – common ancestor, how file looked before both changes
REMOTE – file you are merging into your branch
MERGED – merge result, this is what gets saved in the repo
You can navigate among these views using ctrl+w. You can directly reach MERGED view using ctrl+w followed by j.
More information about vimdiff navigation is here and here.
Step 4. You could edit the MERGED view the following way
If you want to get changes from REMOTE
:diffg RE
If you want to get changes from BASE
:diffg BA
If you want to get changes from LOCAL
:diffg LO
Step 5. Save, Exit, Commit and Clean up
:wqa
save and exit from vi
git commit -m "message"
git clean
Remove extra files (e.g. *.orig) created by diff tool.
Best Answer
In your local clone of your forked repository, you can add the original GitHub repository as a "remote". ("Remotes" are like nicknames for the URLs of repositories -
origin
is one, for example.) Then you can fetch all the branches from that upstream repository, and rebase your work to continue working on the upstream version. In terms of commands that might look like:If you don't want to rewrite the history of your master branch, (for example because other people may have cloned it) then you should replace the last command with
git merge upstream/master
. However, for making further pull requests that are as clean as possible, it's probably better to rebase.If you've rebased your branch onto
upstream/master
you may need to force the push in order to push it to your own forked repository on GitHub. You'd do that with:You only need to use the
-f
the first time after you've rebased.