How to get a fresh copy of a branch from the remote repository?

Question

My friend\'s local master branch is apparently a disaster (through accidental merges and commits, I guess). However, his dev branches are

Answer 1

Paŭlo Ebermann's answer is correct:

git checkout master
git reset --hard origin/master

And add that if you also wish to remove untracked files and ignored files:

git clean -xfn # dry run with -n

Source with further details: How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree?