git-checkout-index(1) Manual Page

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

-u|--index

update stat information for the checked out entries in the 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 used together with explicit filenames.

-n|--no-create

Don't checkout new files, only refresh files already checked out.

--prefix=<string>

When creating files, prepend <string> (usually a directory including a trailing /)

--stage=<number>

Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out the files from named stage. <number> must be between 1 and 3.

--stdin

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

-z

Only meaningful with --stdin; paths are separated with NUL 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 meant git-checkout-index -a. And if you want to force it, you want git-checkout-index -f -a.

Intuitiveness is not the goal here. Repeatability is. The reason for the "no arguments means no work" behavior is that from scripts you are supposed 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 their cached copies. If an empty command line implied "all", then this would force-refresh everything in the index, which was not the point. But since 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.

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 use git-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 specified directory.

The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally just prefixed with the specified string. Contrast this with the following example.

Export files with a prefix

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

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

Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Documentation by David Greaves, Junio C Hamano and the git-list <git@vger.kernel.org>.

Part of the git(7) suite