If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a matching name and --no-guess is not specified, treat as equivalent to

$ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

You could omit <branch>, in which case the command degenerates to "check out the current branch", which is a glorified no-op with rather expensive side-effects to show only the tracking information, if exists, for the current branch.

If -B is given, <new-branch> is created if it doesn’t exist; otherwise, it is reset. This is the transactional equivalent of

$ git branch -f <branch> [<start-point>]
$ git checkout <branch>

that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git checkout" is successful.

When the <commit> argument is a branch name, the --detach option can be used to detach HEAD at the tip of the branch (git checkout <branch> would check out that branch without detaching HEAD).

Omitting <branch> detaches HEAD at the tip of the current branch.

The index may contain unmerged entries because of a previous failed merge. By default, if you try to check out such an entry from the index, the checkout operation will fail and nothing will be checked out. Using -f will ignore these unmerged entries. The contents from a specific side of the merge can be checked out of the index by using --ours or --theirs. With -m, changes made to the working tree file can be discarded to re-create the original conflicted merge result.

When checking out paths from the index, do not fail upon unmerged entries; instead, unmerged entries are ignored.

Note that during git rebase and git pull --rebase, ours and theirs may appear swapped; --ours gives the version from the branch the changes are rebased onto, while --theirs gives the version from the branch that holds your work that is being rebased.

This is because rebase is used in a workflow that treats the history at the remote as the shared canonical one, and treats the work done on the branch you are rebasing as the third-party work to be integrated, and you are temporarily assuming the role of the keeper of the canonical history during the rebase. As the keeper of the canonical history, you need to view the history from the remote as ours (i.e. "our shared canonical history"), while what you did on your side branch as theirs (i.e. "one contributor’s work on top of it").

If no -b option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and then stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given name has no slash, or the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted. You can explicitly give a name with -b in such a case.

$ git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is named by the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable, we’ll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if the <branch> isn’t unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g. checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout remote branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the origin remote. See also checkout.defaultRemote in git-config(1).

--guess is the default behavior. Use --no-guess to disable it.

The default behavior can be set via the checkout.guess configuration variable.

The index and the working tree are adjusted as if you had previously run git checkout <start-point>. This allows you to start a new history that records a set of paths similar to <start-point> by easily running git commit -a to make the root commit.

This can be useful when you want to publish the tree from a commit without exposing its full history. You might want to do this to publish an open source branch of a project whose current tree is "clean", but whose full history contains proprietary or otherwise encumbered bits of code.

If you want to start a disconnected history that records a set of paths that is totally different from the one of <start-point>, then you should clear the index and the working tree right after creating the orphan branch by running git rm -rf . from the top level of the working tree. Afterwards you will be ready to prepare your new files, repopulating the working tree, by copying them from elsewhere, extracting a tarball, etc.

When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you need to resolve the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should result in deletion of the path).

When checking out paths from the index, this option lets you recreate the conflicted merge in the specified paths.

When switching branches with --merge, staged changes may be lost.

This means that you can use git checkout -p to selectively discard edits from your current working tree. See the “Interactive Mode” section of git-add(1) to learn how to operate the --patch mode.

Note that this option uses the no overlay mode by default (see also --overlay), and currently doesn’t support overlay mode.

You can use the @{-N} syntax to refer to the N-th last branch/commit checked out using "git checkout" operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to @{-1}.

As a special case, you may use A...B as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in gitglossary(7).

           HEAD (refers to branch 'master')


            |


            v
a---b---c  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'c')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ edit; git add; git commit


               HEAD (refers to branch 'master')


                |


                v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ git checkout v2.0  # or
$ git checkout master^^


   HEAD (refers to commit 'b')


    |


    v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ edit; git add; git commit


     HEAD (refers to commit 'e')


      |


      v


      e


     /
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ edit; git add; git commit


         HEAD (refers to commit 'f')


          |


          v


      e---f


     /
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ git checkout master


               HEAD (refers to branch 'master')


      e---f     |


     /          v
a---b---c---d  branch 'master' (refers to commit 'd')


    ^


    |


  tag 'v2.0' (refers to commit 'b')

$ git checkout -b foo   (1)
$ git branch foo        (2)
$ git tag foo           (3)

$ git reflog -2 HEAD # or
$ git log -g -2 HEAD

$ git checkout master             (1)
$ git checkout master~2 Makefile  (2)
$ rm -f hello.c
$ git checkout hello.c            (3)

1. switch branch
2. take a file out of another commit
3. restore hello.c from the index

If you want to check out all C source files out of the index, you can say

$ git checkout -- '*.c'

Note the quotes around *.c. The file hello.c will also be checked out, even though it is no longer in the working tree, because the file globbing is used to match entries in the index (not in the working tree by the shell).

If you have an unfortunate branch that is named hello.c, this step would be confused as an instruction to switch to that branch. You should instead write:

$ git checkout -- hello.c

$ git checkout mytopic

However, your "wrong" branch and correct mytopic branch may differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case the above checkout would fail like this:

$ git checkout mytopic
error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.

You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a three-way merge:

$ git checkout -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz

After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not registered in your index file, so git diff would show you what changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

$ git checkout -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz
ERROR: Merge conflict in frotz
fatal: merge program failed

At this point, git diff shows the changes cleanly merged as in the previous example, as well as the changes in the conflicted files. Edit and resolve the conflict and mark it resolved with git add as usual:

$ edit frotz
$ git add frotz

Currently this is used by git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1) when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by git-worktree(1) when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like commands or functionality in the future.

Note: parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also influence how well the parallel version performs.