Question

I am using a script to automatically checkout the first commit of each month, for the last 12 months. Occasionally something strange happens and I am no longer allowed to checkout past commits. The error goes something like this:

error: Your local changes to the following files wold be overwritten by checkout:

db tests/framework.cpp

Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches. Aborting

This has happened many times (I am not editing any files, just checking them out). I usually just download a fresh copy of the repo from Github and start the process again and it works. But once it breaks I don’t know how to fix it, and it keeps happening. Any thoughts?

Here is the iteration going on in my script, followed by the output of git status

for i in {12..1}

do

cd
cd git/mongodb/mongo

git checkout master                   
git checkout $(git rev-list --before "$(date -d "$(date +%Y-%m-01) -$i months 00:01" +%Y-%m)-01" -n 1 HEAD)
git checkout master

Git status:

On branch master

Changes not staged for commit:

        modified:    dbtests/framework.cpp

Untracked files:

       SHA1.txt
       SHA1.txt.
       file
       file.

no changes added to commit

Answer 1

You can use the --force flag to make Git do the checkout anyway.

Alternatively, you could use git reset --hard instead to reset to the commits, rather than using checkout.