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GIT-CHECKOUT(1)                                       Git Manual                                      GIT-CHECKOUT(1)



NAME
       git-checkout - Checkout a branch or paths to the working tree

SYNOPSIS
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [<branch>]
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [--detach] [<commit>]
       git checkout [-q] [-f] [-m] [[-b|-B|--orphan] <new_branch>] [<start_point>]
       git checkout [-f|--ours|--theirs|-m|--conflict=<style>] [<tree-ish>] [--] <paths>...
       git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] [<paths>...]


DESCRIPTION
       Updates files in the working tree to match the version in the index or the specified tree. If no paths are
       given, git checkout will also update HEAD to set the specified branch as the current branch.

       git checkout <branch>
           To prepare for working on <branch>, switch to it by updating the index and the files in the working tree,
           and by pointing HEAD at the branch. Local modifications to the files in the working tree are kept, so that
           they can be committed to the <branch>.

           If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>)
           with a matching name, treat as equivalent to

               $ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

           You could omit <branch>, in which case the command degenerates to "check out the current branch", which is
           a glorified no-op with a rather expensive side-effects to show only the tracking information, if exists,
           for the current branch.

       git checkout -b|-B <new_branch> [<start point>]
           Specifying -b causes a new branch to be created as if git-branch(1) were called and then checked out. In
           this case you can use the --track or --no-track options, which will be passed to git branch. As a
           convenience, --track without -b implies branch creation; see the description of --track below.

           If -B is given, <new_branch> is created if it doesn’t exist; otherwise, it is reset. This is the
           transactional equivalent of

               $ git branch -f <branch> [<start point>]
               $ git checkout <branch>

           that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git checkout" is successful.

       git checkout --detach [<branch>], git checkout <commit>
           Prepare to work on top of <commit>, by detaching HEAD at it (see "DETACHED HEAD" section), and updating
           the index and the files in the working tree. Local modifications to the files in the working tree are
           kept, so that the resulting working tree will be the state recorded in the commit plus the local
           modifications.

           Passing --detach forces this behavior in the case of a <branch> (without the option, giving a branch name
           to the command would check out the branch, instead of detaching HEAD at it), or the current commit, if no
           <branch> is specified.

       git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>...
           When <paths> or --patch are given, git checkout does not switch branches. It updates the named paths in
           the working tree from the index file or from a named <tree-ish> (most often a commit). In this case, the
           -b and --track options are meaningless and giving either of them results in an error. The <tree-ish>

       -f, --force
           When switching branches, proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. This is used to
           throw away local changes.

           When checking out paths from the index, do not fail upon unmerged entries; instead, unmerged entries are
           ignored.

       --ours, --theirs
           When checking out paths from the index, check out stage #2 (ours) or #3 (theirs) for unmerged paths.

       -b <new_branch>
           Create a new branch named <new_branch> and start it at <start_point>; see git-branch(1) for details.

       -B <new_branch>
           Creates the branch <new_branch> and start it at <start_point>; if it already exists, then reset it to
           <start_point>. This is equivalent to running "git branch" with "-f"; see git-branch(1) for details.

       -t, --track
           When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration. See "--track" in git-branch(1) for details.

           If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch. If
           "remotes/" or "refs/remotes/" is prefixed it is stripped away, and then the part up to the next slash
           (which would be the nickname of the remote) is removed. This would tell us to use "hack" as the local
           branch when branching off of "origin/hack" (or "remotes/origin/hack", or even "refs/remotes/origin/hack").
           If the given name has no slash, or the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted.
           You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.

       --no-track
           Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the branch.autosetupmerge configuration variable is true.

       -l
           Create the new branch’s reflog; see git-branch(1) for details.

       --detach
           Rather than checking out a branch to work on it, check out a commit for inspection and discardable
           experiments. This is the default behavior of "git checkout <commit>" when <commit> is not a branch name.
           See the "DETACHED HEAD" section below for details.

       --orphan <new_branch>
           Create a new orphan branch, named <new_branch>, started from <start_point> and switch to it. The first
           commit made on this new branch will have no parents and it will be the root of a new history totally
           disconnected from all the other branches and commits.

           The index and the working tree are adjusted as if you had previously run "git checkout <start_point>".
           This allows you to start a new history that records a set of paths similar to <start_point> by easily
           running "git commit -a" to make the root commit.

           This can be useful when you want to publish the tree from a commit without exposing its full history. You
           might want to do this to publish an open source branch of a project whose current tree is "clean", but
           whose full history contains proprietary or otherwise encumbered bits of code.

           If you want to start a disconnected history that records a set of paths that is totally different from the
           one of <start_point>, then you should clear the index and the working tree right after creating the orphan
           order to preserve your modifications in context. However, with this option, a three-way merge between the
           current branch, your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and you will be on the new branch.

           When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you need to
           resolve the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should result in
           deletion of the path).

           When checking out paths from the index, this option lets you recreate the conflicted merge in the
           specified paths.

       --conflict=<style>
           The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the
           merge.conflictstyle configuration variable. Possible values are "merge" (default) and "diff3" (in addition
           to what is shown by "merge" style, shows the original contents).

       -p, --patch
           Interactively select hunks in the difference between the <tree-ish> (or the index, if unspecified) and the
           working tree. The chosen hunks are then applied in reverse to the working tree (and if a <tree-ish> was
           specified, the index).

           This means that you can use git checkout -p to selectively discard edits from your current working tree.
           See the “Interactive Mode” section of git-add(1) to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

       <branch>
           Branch to checkout; if it refers to a branch (i.e., a name that, when prepended with "refs/heads/", is a
           valid ref), then that branch is checked out. Otherwise, if it refers to a valid commit, your HEAD becomes
           "detached" and you are no longer on any branch (see below for details).

           As a special case, the "@{-N}" syntax for the N-th last branch checks out the branch (instead of
           detaching). You may also specify - which is synonymous with "@{-1}".

           As a further special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is
           exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

       <new_branch>
           Name for the new branch.

       <start_point>
           The name of a commit at which to start the new branch; see git-branch(1) for details. Defaults to HEAD.

       <tree-ish>
           Tree to checkout from (when paths are given). If not specified, the index will be used.

DETACHED HEAD
       HEAD normally refers to a named branch (e.g. master). Meanwhile, each branch refers to a specific commit.
       Let’s look at a repo with three commits, one of them tagged, and with branch master checked out:

                      HEAD (refers to branch 'master')
                       |
                       v
           a---b---c  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'c')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       It is sometimes useful to be able to checkout a commit that is not at the tip of any named branch, or even to
       create a new commit that is not referenced by a named branch. Let’s look at what happens when we checkout
       commit b (here we show two ways this may be done):

           $ git checkout v2.0  # or
           $ git checkout master^^

              HEAD (refers to commit 'b')
               |
               v
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       Notice that regardless of which checkout command we use, HEAD now refers directly to commit b. This is known
       as being in detached HEAD state. It means simply that HEAD refers to a specific commit, as opposed to
       referring to a named branch. Let’s see what happens when we create a commit:

           $ edit; git add; git commit

                HEAD (refers to commit 'e')
                 |
                 v
                 e
                /
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')


       There is now a new commit e, but it is referenced only by HEAD. We can of course add yet another commit in
       this state:

           $ edit; git add; git commit

                    HEAD (refers to commit 'f')
                     |
                     v
                 e---f
                /
           a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')
               ^
               |
             tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')




       It is important to realize that at this point nothing refers to commit f. Eventually commit f (and by
       extension commit e) will be deleted by the routine Git garbage collection process, unless we create a
       reference before that happens. If we have not yet moved away from commit f, any of these will create a
       reference to it:

           $ git checkout -b foo   (1)
           $ git branch foo        (2)
           $ git tag foo           (3)


       1. creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, and then updates HEAD to refer to branch foo. In other
       words, we’ll no longer be in detached HEAD state after this command.
       2. similarly creates a new branch foo, which refers to commit f, but leaves HEAD detached.
       3. creates a new tag foo, which refers to commit f, leaving HEAD detached.

       If we have moved away from commit f, then we must first recover its object name (typically by using git
       reflog), and then we can create a reference to it. For example, to see the last two commits to which HEAD
       referred, we can use either of these commands:

           $ git reflog -2 HEAD # or
           $ git log -g -2 HEAD


EXAMPLES
        1. The following sequence checks out the master branch, reverts the Makefile to two revisions back, deletes
           hello.c by mistake, and gets it back from the index.

               $ git checkout master             (1)
               $ git checkout master~2 Makefile  (2)
               $ rm -f hello.c
               $ git checkout hello.c            (3)

           1. switch branch
           2. take a file out of another commit
           3. restore hello.c from the index

           If you want to check out all C source files out of the index, you can say

               $ git checkout -- '*.c'

           Note the quotes around *.c. The file hello.c will also be checked out, even though it is no longer in the
           working tree, because the file globbing is used to match entries in the index (not in the working tree by
           the shell).

           If you have an unfortunate branch that is named hello.c, this step would be confused as an instruction to
           switch to that branch. You should instead write:

               $ git checkout -- hello.c


        2. After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch would be done using:


           After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not registered in your index file, so git diff
           would show you what changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

        3. When a merge conflict happens during switching branches with the -m option, you would see something like
           this:

               $ git checkout -m mytopic
               Auto-merging frotz
               ERROR: Merge conflict in frotz
               fatal: merge program failed

           At this point, git diff shows the changes cleanly merged as in the previous example, as well as the
           changes in the conflicted files. Edit and resolve the conflict and mark it resolved with git add as usual:

               $ edit frotz
               $ git add frotz


GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite



Git 1.8.3.1                                           03/23/2016                                      GIT-CHECKOUT(1)