Hello, While merging with uncommitted changes is strongly discouraged, Git generally tries to not overwrite your work without warning. However, there are some situations where Git silently erases uncommitted changes. Specifically, it seems that if you rename a directory on one branch, make uncommitted changes to files within that branch, then merge in another branch, files that would conflict get replaced by the version on the other branch. We have observed this on Git versions 1.7.5.4 and 1.7.7.3. I have placed a script demonstrating this problem at https://gist.github.com/1354160 Here is a shell transcript showing what it looks like: gitbug$ git init single Initialized empty Git repository in /home/paul/gitprojects/gitbug/single/.git/ gitbug$ cd single/ gitbug/single$ mkdir test gitbug/single$ echo "hi" > test/test.txt gitbug/single$ git add . gitbug/single$ git commit -am "initial revision" [master (root-commit) 8be9a1e] initial revision 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 test/test.txt gitbug/single$ git checkout -b branch1 Switched to a new branch 'branch1' gitbug/single$ git mv test/ test2 gitbug/single$ git commit -am "renamed test to test2" [branch1 80d497c] renamed test to test2 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) rename {test => test2}/test.txt (100%) gitbug/single$ git checkout master Switched to branch 'master' gitbug/single$ echo "change on master" >> test/test.txt gitbug/single$ git commit -am "made a change on master" [master 51d3a75] made a change on master 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) gitbug/single$ git checkout branch1 Switched to branch 'branch1' gitbug/single$ echo "change on branch1" >> test2/test.txt gitbug/single$ git merge master Auto-merging test2/test.txt Merge made by recursive. test2/test.txt | 1 + 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) gitbug/single$ cat test2/test.txt hi change on master gitbug/single$ I expected the merge to fail as it usually does when there is a conflict with uncommitted changes. Instead, it silently deleted the changes in test.txt. One of our developers just lost a few hours of work to this bug. Please fix! Sincerely, Paul Grayson -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html