NAME

git-checkout-index - Copy files from the index to the working tree

SYNOPSIS

git checkout-index [-u] [-q] [-a] [-f] [-n] [--prefix=<string>]
           [--stage=<number>|all]
           [--temp]
           [-z] [--stdin]
           [--] [<file>…​]

DESCRIPTION

Will copy all files listed from the index to the working directory(not overwriting existing files).

OPTIONS

• -u
• —index

• update stat information for the checked out entries inthe index file.

• -q

• —quiet

• be quiet if files exist or are not in the index

• -f

• —force

• forces overwrite of existing files

• -a

• —all

• checks out all files in the index. Cannot be usedtogether with explicit filenames.

• -n

• —no-create

• Don’t checkout new files, only refresh files already checkedout.

• —prefix=

• When creating files, prepend (usually a directoryincluding a trailing /)

• —stage=|all

• Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out thefiles from named stage. must be between 1 and 3.Note: —stage=all automatically implies —temp.

• —temp

• Instead of copying the files to the working directorywrite the content to temporary files. The temporary nameassociations will be written to stdout.

• —stdin

• Instead of taking list of paths from the command line,read list of paths from the standard input. Paths areseparated by LF (i.e. one path per line) by default.

• -z

• Only meaningful with —stdin; paths are separated withNUL character instead of LF.

• —

• Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

The order of the flags used to matter, but not anymore.

Just doing git checkout-index does nothing. You probably meantgit checkout-index -a. And if you want to force it, you wantgit checkout-index -f -a.

Intuitiveness is not the goal here. Repeatability is. The reason forthe "no arguments means no work" behavior is that from scripts you aresupposed to be able to do:

$ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | xargs -0 git checkout-index -f --

which will force all existing *.h files to be replaced with theircached copies. If an empty command line implied "all", then this wouldforce-refresh everything in the index, which was not the point. Butsince git checkout-index accepts —stdin it would be faster to use:

$ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | git checkout-index -f -z --stdin

The — is just a good idea when you know the rest will be filenames;it will prevent problems with a filename of, for example, -a.Using — is probably a good policy in scripts.

Using —temp or —stage=all

When —temp is used (or implied by —stage=all)git checkout-index will create a temporary file for each indexentry being checked out. The index will not be updated with statinformation. These options can be useful if the caller needs allstages of all unmerged entries so that the unmerged files can beprocessed by an external merge tool.

A listing will be written to stdout providing the association oftemporary file names to tracked path names. The listing formathas two variations:

• tempname TAB path RS

The first format is what gets used when —stage is omitted oris not —stage=all. The field tempname is the temporary filename holding the file content and path is the tracked path name inthe index. Only the requested entries are output.

• stage1temp SP stage2temp SP stage3tmp TAB path RS

The second format is what gets used when —stage=all. The threestage temporary fields (stage1temp, stage2temp, stage3temp) list thename of the temporary file if there is a stage entry in the indexor . if there is no stage entry. Paths which only have a stage 0entry will always be omitted from the output.

In both formats RS (the record separator) is newline by defaultbut will be the null byte if -z was passed on the command line.The temporary file names are always safe strings; they will nevercontain directory separators or whitespace characters. The pathfield is always relative to the current directory and the temporaryfile names are always relative to the top level directory.

If the object being copied out to a temporary file is a symboliclink the content of the link will be written to a normal file. It isup to the end-user or the Porcelain to make use of this information.

EXAMPLES

• To update and refresh only the files already checked out

$ git checkout-index -n -f -a && git update-index --ignore-missing --refresh

• Using git checkout-index to "export an entire tree"
• The prefix ability basically makes it trivial to usegit checkout-index as an "export as tree" function.Just read the desired tree into the index, and do:

$ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

git checkout-index will "export" the index into the specifieddirectory.

The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally justprefixed with the specified string. Contrast this with thefollowing example.

• Export files with a prefix

$ git checkout-index --prefix=.merged- Makefile

This will check out the currently cached copy of Makefileinto the file .merged-Makefile.

GIT

Part of the git[1] suite