Re: checkout extra files

Angelo Borsotti [off-list ref] writes:

Hello,

the man page of git checkout states:

git checkout [-p|--patch] [<tree-ish>] [--] <pathspec>...

It updates the named paths in the working tree from the index file or
from a named <tree-ish> ...

This means that for each file denoted by pathspec, git tries to
restore it from the tree-ish.
However, it seems that git does more than this: it restores also files
that are not denoted
by pathspec.
This sequence of commands shows it:

$ mkdir gittest
$ cd gittest
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in d:/gittest/.git/
$ touch f1
$ git add f1
$ git commit commit -m "first commit"
[master (root-commit) 94d882a] first commit
 0 files changed
 create mode 100644 f1
$ rm f1
$ git checkout 94d8 -- *
$ ls
f1

Note that the work directory is empty when the checkout is done, and
that the checkout restores f1
in it, a file that is not denoted by the * pathspec.

The '*' pathspec refers to every file. There are no files in the current
directory, so your shell can't expand the glob and passes it to git,
which then looks and sees that the glob expands to f1 in the given
commit which it then checks out.

   cmn