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:
$ git checkout mytopic
However, your "wrong" branch and correct mytopic branch may
differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case
the above checkout would fail like this:
$ git checkout mytopic
error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.
You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a
three-way merge:
$ git checkout -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz
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
