git-checkout-index - Copy files from the index to the working directory
Will copy all files listed from the index to the working directory (not overwriting existing files).
update stat information for the checked out entries in the index file.
be quiet if files exist or are not in the index
forces overwrite of existing files
checks out all files in the index. Cannot be used together with explicit filenames.
Don't checkout new files, only refresh files already checked out.
When creating files, prepend <string> (usually a directory including a trailing /)
Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out the files from named stage. <number> must be between 1 and 3.
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.
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.
$ git-checkout-index -n -f -a && git-update-index --ignore-missing --refresh
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.
$ 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