Re: "git checkout foo" is getting confused by folder named "foo"

From: Keshav Kini <keshav.kini@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 25, 2013, 03:13 UTC
Message-ID: <87y56lsie0.fsf@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJDDKr64ou+gO7WJLFZ4zOSv+VCbkiW7nKuZa9=5_fiSqGUeyQ@mail.gmail.com>

David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt
> <jc@sahnwaldt.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> maybe this has already been reported, but I didn't find it in the mail archive.
>>
>> If I understand correctly, after I clone a repo, I should be able to
>> switch to branch foo just by running
>>
>> git checkout foo
>>
>> This doesn't seem to work if a folder called "foo" exists in the root
>> of the repo.
>
> git checkout foo --
>
> The double-dash at the end disambiguates between refs and paths.
>
> You can use that trick on any command that accepts refspec (branches,
> tags, etc) and pathspec (path patterns).

I was going to reply with similar advice, but I actually tried it on the example repo and it didn't work. Apparently it doesn't interoperate properly with the functionality that guesses when you're trying to check out a remote branch and creates an equivalently named local branch.

    [2] fs@erdos /tmp $ git clone https://github.com/dbpedia/extraction-framework.git
    Cloning into 'extraction-framework'...
    remote: Counting objects: 33513, done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (6633/6633), done.
    remote: Total 33513 (delta 19000), reused 32922 (delta 18436)
    Receiving objects: 100% (33513/33513), 23.48 MiB | 747.00 KiB/s, done.
    Resolving deltas: 100% (19000/19000), done.
    Checking connectivity... done
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp $ cd extraction-framework/
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git checkout live-dev --
    fatal: invalid reference: live-dev
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git checkout live-dev
    Branch live-dev set up to track remote branch live-dev from origin.
    Switched to a new branch 'live-dev'
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git checkout master
    Switched to branch 'master'
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git checkout wiktionary
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git branch
      live-dev
    * master
    [2] fs@erdos /tmp/extraction-framework $ git checkout wiktionary --
    fatal: invalid reference: wiktionary

-Keshav