Git: Untracked files problem

Tags: clean delete git merge untracked files

I edited my working copy of a project in git and now I can't do a git pull to merge, because I added a few files. I don't have commit privileges on the remote project, so I emailed them to the maintainer, and now git won't merge them in. I get this error:

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

There are two ways to handle this:

git add . Adds the names of the files in the local copy, to git's concept of tracked files. Then a git fetch will succeed.
git clean -n will do a dry run (-n) of a clean operation, which will remove all non-tracked files from your local copy. If you agree, git clean -d will actually delete thosee files; then git fetch or git pull will succeed.