The Dyer Laboratory: Google Drive 038 Git

Rodney Dyer

I was experiencing a bit of a problem with some conflicting files on google drive and a github repository. I mirror my google drive as my Documents folder and on occassion, I am logged into more than one machine at a time and if you work on the same files without saving, they result in a conflict. I notice this when I got the message.

Office-iMac:gstudio rodney$ git pull
fatal: Reference has invalid format: 'refs/heads/master[Conflict 1]'

And then when I looked into my .git folder, I saw

Office-iMac:gstudio rodney$ cd .git
Office-iMac:.git rodney$ ls
COMMIT_EDITMSG index
COMMIT_EDITMSG[Conflict 1] index[Conflict 1]
COMMIT_EDITMSG[Conflict] index[Conflict 2]
FETCH_HEAD index[Conflict 3]
FETCH_HEAD[Conflict 1] index[Conflict 4]
FETCH_HEAD[Conflict] index[Conflict 5]
HEAD index[Conflict]
ORIG_HEAD info
ORIG_HEAD[Conflict] logs
branches objects
config packed-refs
description refs
hooks

Apparently, git does not like square brackets and such in the names. To fix this, you need to do the following.

find .git -type f -name "*Conflict*" -exec rm -f {} \;

And then clean up the packed references as:

awk '!/conflicted/' .git/packed-refs > temp && mv temp .git/packed-refs

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Dyer (2016, June 22). The Dyer Laboratory: Google Drive 038 Git. Retrieved from https://dyerlab.github.io/DLabWebsite/posts/2016-06-22-google-drive-038-git/

BibTeX citation

@misc{dyer2016google,
  author = {Dyer, Rodney},
  title = {The Dyer Laboratory: Google Drive 038 Git},
  url = {https://dyerlab.github.io/DLabWebsite/posts/2016-06-22-google-drive-038-git/},
  year = {2016}
}