Trouble merging to master when topic branch has a dir added

Hi, This is a newbie question.

I created a topic branch and made a few commits which added a few directories. I'd like to merge these changes back to master. I get the following error messages.

frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ ls
logger-inc  logger-src  Makefile  test-driver
frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ git branch
  debug-printf-help
  debug-static
  master
* split-into-dirs
frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ git checkout master
fatal: Entry 'logger-src/logger.cpp' would be overwritten by merge.
Cannot merge.

I think the above error is due to the fact that the branch master did not have these directories.

frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ git-ls-tree master
100644 blob 82ccb7971fc36db2bc54bb5a590f97cd37c998fb    .gitignore
100644 blob 9971a5a432d575cc682145454e5260f83e1b9fb3    Makefile
100644 blob b8f6c213ebb831ed8704b7f0e0e665212b808649    client.cpp
100644 blob d01aaec4138862ccae4be9de2c672ddaeccfa21d    logger.cpp
100644 blob 37c15a22b325934ea685a76cfd528c2bf6464f2b    logger.h
frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ git-ls-tree split-into-dirs
100644 blob 82ccb7971fc36db2bc54bb5a590f97cd37c998fb    .gitignore
100644 blob 7c497aff60175ce212415c1737e224f517f785e9    Makefile
040000 tree 4f181412688afaa30929b752cc1fb3f2cda3cba9    logger-inc
       <=== new dir
040000 tree 4fb363dac2a00d93d1a958f74021fcd0e3bc861e    logger-src
      <===
040000 tree bb2b91b6ec1d11d23ab8e7a3c8935504079f6bf3    test-driver         <===

Could someone help me out with this? frodo@laptop-zion:~/src/c/logger$ git --version git version 1.5.2.5

Regards, Frodo B

It looks like there is some uncommitted changes in the file logger-src/logger.cpp. You cannot switch to the master branch because it has no knowledge of that file so any uncommitted changes will be lost. If the changes are important you should commit them first (to a side branch if you don't want them to be part of the merge) or if useless you can remove them with git checkout HEAD logger-src/logger.cpp

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Frodo Baggins <frodo.drogo@gmail.com> wrote: