Quickly cherry picking commits between branches

[Razique]

I wanted to share a neat tip that I discovered this morning.

I am currently working with two branches, one that a couple of developers maintain, and one that I maintain, which contains some build artifacts. I wanted to maintain some of the files in my branch current to the developers branch, but I did not want to merge everything.

This is where the checkout feature comes handy.

Say that there is a image1.png file in the dev branch that I need to merge in my build branch.

I simply run the following commands

$ git checkout build
$ git checkout dev image1.png
$ git add . 

This adds the image that is in the dev branch to my build branch.

Notice that I can also use a wildcard with that feature:

$ git checkout dev images/*

Pretty cool eh :)

[joelbirchler]

Be careful not to confuse this with the Git cherry-pick command. The checkout process that you describe above restores a file from a specified branch into your current branch. This is slightly different than cherry-picking a commit.

You can use git cherry-pick <commit> to apply a specific commit on to your branch. This can be useful when manually grabbing whole commits from a branch without integrate other changes.

[Razique]

Thanks Joel. Yes I did not mean to imply that this was the Git cherry-pick feature.

[sbulav]

I use this trick all the time to quickly revert file to it's remote state in master:

git checkout origin/master -- path/to/file

[Razique]

Good stuff :)