What does the conflict "Both Modified" mean in git

Question

I am just pulling some code from a repository on github. Then In vsCode I see the editor is suggesting to solve the merge conflict. Then I accept the incoming changes and solve the merge conflict. But the file is showing error and when I hover over that it tells me that conflict: both modified. What does that mean.

In codium/vscode, it looks like this:

Answer 1

I am still a beginner at git, warning. This is real code that worked, but it is no guarantee that it will work the same for other things. I hope it still helps someone.

I had the same conflict, and here is what I did in the shell (command: history). It pops up when you have different work done in parallel and you have a merge conflict that must be solved before it pops up.

Being in MY_BRANCH, I ran:

 2004  git stash
 2005  git checkout master
 2006  git fetch
 2007  git pull
 2018  git checkout MY_BRANCH
 2019  git log
# You may also use `git reflog` instead of `git log` to see the 
# numbers of the references.
 2024  git branch
 2026  git status
 2027  git rebase -i 633e0424523c4933ba6ab...
 2029  git rebase -i HEAD~
 2030  git log
 2031  git stash apply
 2032  git status
 2033  git add .
 2034  git rebase --continue
 2035  git log
 2036  git push -f
 2037  git branch
 2038  git status
 2039  git diff master

Main steps:

• git stash (in MY_BRANCH)
• git pull your master
• rebase to the commit after which different work has been done in parallel
• then apply your stash to the rebased commit (see all stashes with git stash list
• add . your changes to the stage
• rebase --continue to take over the work back to MY_BRANCH
• push -f the updated work to your branch
• check diff, the error of "Both Modified" should be gone (in my case at least).

UPDATE:

Even after these changes, I got the same thing again: "Both modified". I am not sure how this came up again since a lot of changes have been made since the answer above. Yet, with some bad luck, the above code does not fully show the way out.

What I had to do when "Both modified" popped up again:

 1998  git status

gives:

On branch MY_BRANCH Your branch and 'origin/MY_BRANCH' have diverged, and have 4 and 1 different commits each, respectively. (use "git pull" to merge the remote branch into yours)

 1999  git reset --hard origin/MY_BRANCH
 2000  git pull
 2001  git status
 2002  git add .
 2003  git commit --amend
 2004  git push -f

UPDATE2:

I had the issue again, it showed up during rebase since my main and the origin/main were not the same: Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit. Two steps:

git checkout main
git reset HEAD^ --soft

were all that was needed. I used the --soft parameter to save it in case of problems. After the reset, the main and the 'origin/main' were the same again and the error that had popped up before during rebase was gone.