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When using Git in a team environment on a complex project, common problems are likely to occur at any time. Merges and conflicts are a common part of these problems.

Resolving conflicts in other version control systems is very hectic as it is expensive and time consuming. Whereas in Git, handling these situations is very easy.

Most of the time, Git automatically figures out how to merge new changes and makes it very easy for developers to manage these tasks in a short period of time.

Git merge error

This error usually occurs when there are files with unresolved conflicts in the working directory. Conflicts occur when developers are working on a huge project in a team structure and several developers work on the same file and make changes in a conflicting way.

If two people are working on the same file, chances are Git can figure it out on its own. But sometimes Git can't do that, because sometimes two different developers make the same changes to the same file.

In this case, Git doesn’t know what to do. Here, we have to manage this situation ourselves by manually merging the conflicting lines in the code files by opening the files in Notepad or any Visual Studio Code tool.

git status

First, we will use the command git status to understand where the merge conflicts are. Here Git will find out where the edits were made in a conflicting manner by specifically mentioning the category of unmerged paths, as shown below:

$ git status
# On branch contact-form
# You have unmerged paths.
#   (fix conflicts and run "git commit")
#
# Unmerged paths:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
#
#       both modified:   contact.html
#

Conflict Resolution

Now that a conflict has been detected, we will change the conflicting required file to the correct format. This can be achieved through two different techniques.

git checkout --ours path/to/conflict-file.css

After successfully resolving the conflict, we still have to do two more steps to get the final result.

Perform git add <filepath>, marking each conflicted file as solved.

Complete the process to commit the solution using the command git commit, just like we would commit any other changes using this command.