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.

—

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.

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