git merge file with conflict

[shufen_koh]

Aaron and Billy are working on the same file (abcd.text) on master. Aaron committed the file first. When Billy do git pull, he has a conflict. How can Billy take in the changes from Aaron and still keep his own changes? What is the best way to achieve this?

[Tyler T]

Hi @shufen_koh , welcome to the Community!

Billy has a few options.

If his changes are not yet in a commit, he could stash his changes, pull down the latest master, then reapply his changes and resolve the conflict. On the command line, that would look something like this:

git add abcd.text
git stash
git pull
git stash pop

# fix conflict
git add abcd.text
git commit -m 'Commit message'
git push origin master

If a commit has already been made, the workflow would be similar.

Does that help? 

If Billy is still having an issue, please paste his error message here. 

Another more destructive option would be to reset his local branch to origin/master, pull down the latest changes, and then reapply his changes to the file.