How to force a git merge conflict

Question

When you have merge conflicts in git, they appear in the file like this:

<<<< 
  old
  old
====
  new
  new
>>>>

Now, I have some changes on origin/master I am going to merge into my local master branch. If I just merge them normally, the new lines will just appear nicely into the file, since there are no conflicts.

However, I want changes to appear like those merge conflicts above, so I can see both the old and new lines where the conflicts are, surrounded by <<<< and >>>> , review every change manually and delete stuff that should go away.

How do I "provoke" such a conflict?

A workaround is doing git diff -U999999 original.txt > review.txt , but then you have to delete a lot of - and + characters at the beginning of every line when reviewing the file.

Answer 1

before you commit, you can just do git diff path/to/file to see what has changed.

You can easily setup a graphical tool to use when doing a diff or conflict resolution - see http://adventuresincoding.com/2010/04/how-to-setup-git-to-use-diffmerge for examples.

I use DiffMerge , and when doing a diff, this lets you remove your changes individually, which sounds like the behaviour you want.