How to abort an interactive rebase if --abort doesn't work?

Question

I've got myself into a muddle via an interactive rebase, and I now wish to abort it. (i.e. go back to the point before I was dropped into interactive rebase mode, in my case via `git pull --rebase`.) The way to do this seems to be via `git rebase --abort`, but this doesn't work: ``` $ git rebase --abort error: Ref refs/heads/master is at 55b388c141b1485b1acd9e050dbeb0eb90ef2ee7 but expected b918ac16a33881ce00799bea63d9c23bf7022d67 fatal: Cannot lock the ref 'refs/heads/master'. Could not move back to refs/heads/master ``` How can I get out of interactive rebase mode, and clean up all references to it? (`git reset --hard` succeeds, but doesn't drop me out of rebase mode.)

Accepted Answer

Try to follow the advice you see on the screen, and first reset your master's HEAD to the commit it expects.

```
git update-ref refs/heads/master b918ac16a33881ce00799bea63d9c23bf7022d67
```

Then, abort the rebase again.

How to abort an interactive rebase if --abort doesn't work?

Solution

Problem