Why does a git merge with conflicts end up with me having .lock files?

Question

I am doing a git merge.

I got two conflicts:

One in spec/controllers/vehicles/vehicle_controller_spec. The other in Gemfile.lock

I resolved the conflict and I see the files I modified which I plan to add and commit.

That is a process I've done many times beforfe without issue.

However this time I see some new files that I've not seen before:

# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       Gemfile.lock.BACKUP.5776.lock
#       Gemfile.lock.BASE.5776.lock
#       Gemfile.lock.LOCAL.5776.lock
#       Gemfile.lock.REMOTE.5776.lock

They seem related to the fact that Gemfile.lock had a conflict but I've never seen this before.

Can I just delete these files?

Are you using the `git` command line interface or some other Git client? — ChrisGPT was on strike, Apr 03 '14 at 16:31
I'm using the cli though I did recently try a visual merge tool. Maybe it left some files? Though my colleague has also seen this new behavior and he wasn't trying a new tool. — Michael Durrant, Apr 03 '14 at 16:33
Any chance it was TortoiseMerge as [suggested in this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14044765/git-backup-base-local-remote-files)? — ChrisGPT was on strike, Apr 03 '14 at 16:35

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 03 '14 at 16:34

The .lock suffix is purely there because the file with conflicts was itself a .lock file. Those files are created by git mergetool when it's preparing temporary files for use by the merge tool. They are normally cleaned up after the merge tool exits but may be left around if git mergetool is interrupted before the merge tool exits cleanly.

The extension is preserved on the temporary files in case the merge tool wants to use the extension as part of its logic for determining the file type so that it can do things such as the correct syntax highlighting or even sane automatic merging for a given type of file.

Schleis · Answer 2 · 2014-04-03T16:40:46.047

Those files are from resolving the merge, they are copies of the various states of the file for resolving the conflict. If your conflict has been resolved, the files can be deleted.

REMOTE - this is the file that was brought in via the merge.
LOCAL - this is the file that you had in your local repo
BASE - I believe that this file is the state of the file for the last common commit
BACKUP - I believe that this file is a copy of the file with the conflicts marked.

These files were created by the tool that you used to resolve the conflict. I personally use vimdiff which results in .swp files being created. Then after the conflicts are resolved, I just delete the files.

Why does a git merge with conflicts end up with me having .lock files?

2 Answers2