git-checkout-index - Man Page

• Restore any files deleted since the last commit: git checkout-index [-a|--all]
• Restore any files deleted or changed since the last commit: git checkout-index [-a|--all] [-f|--force]
• Restore any files changed since the last commit, ignoring any files that were deleted: git checkout-index [-a|--all] [-f|--force] [-n|--no-create]
• Export a copy of the entire tree at the last commit to the specified directory (the trailing slash is important): git checkout-index [-a|--all] [-f|--force] --prefix path/to/export_directory/

tldr.sh

git checkout-index [-u] [-q] [-a] [-f] [-n] [--prefix=<string>]
                   [--stage=<number>|all]
                   [--temp]
                   [--ignore-skip-worktree-bits]
                   [-z] [--stdin]
                   [--] [<file>​...]

Copies all listed files 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 except for those with the skip-worktree bit set (see --ignore-skip-worktree-bits)​. 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>|all

Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out the files from the named stage​. <number> must be between 1 and 3​. Note: --stage=all automatically implies --temp​.

--temp

Instead of copying the files to the working directory, write the content to temporary files​. The temporary name associations will be written to stdout​.

--ignore-skip-worktree-bits

Check out all files, including those with the skip-worktree bit set​.

--stdin

Instead of taking a list of paths from the command line, read the 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​.

When --temp is used (or implied by --stage=all) git checkout-index will create a temporary file for each index entry being checked out​. The index will not be updated with stat information​. These options can be useful if the caller needs all stages of all unmerged entries so that the unmerged files can be processed by an external merge tool​.

A listing will be written to stdout providing the association of temporary file names to tracked path names​. The listing format has two variations:

1. tempname TAB path RS

   The first format is what gets used when --stage is omitted or is not --stage=all​. The field tempname is the temporary file name holding the file content and path is the tracked path name in the index​. Only the requested entries are output​.

2. stage1temp SP stage2temp SP stage3tmp TAB path RS

   The second format is what gets used when --stage=all​. The three stage temporary fields (stage1temp, stage2temp, stage3temp) list the name of the temporary file if there is a stage entry in the index or ​. if there is no stage entry​. Paths which only have a stage 0 entry will always be omitted from the output​.

In both formats RS (the record separator) is newline by default but will be the null byte if -z was passed on the command line​. The temporary file names are always safe strings; they will never contain directory separators or whitespace characters​. The path field is always relative to the current directory and the temporary file names are always relative to the top level directory​.

If the object being copied out to a temporary file is a symbolic link the content of the link will be written to a normal file​. It is up to the end-user or the Porcelain to make use of this information​.

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"

$ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

Export files with a prefix

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

Part of the git(1) suite