threads / discuss / 23080

merge only some of the changed files?

Subject: merge only some of the changed files?

## tl;dr

3 messages between Mar 19, 2010 and Mar 19, 2010.

replies: 2people: 3as markdown or json

fkater@googlemail.com· Mar 19, 2010, 13:40 UTC · lore

Hi all,

I am quite new to git.

If I want to merge branch B into A, however not all of the changed files in B, how do I do that?

In other words: 'git diff --name-only A..B' lists 10 files but I want to merge only 5 of them.

Thank You
 Felix

Michael J Gruber· Mar 19, 2010, 13:55 UTC · re: fkater@googlemail.com · lore

Re: merge only some of the changed files?

fkater@googlemail.com venit, vidit, dixit 19.03.2010 14:40:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Hi all,
> 
> I am quite new to git.
> 
> If I want to merge branch B into A, however not all of the
> changed files in B, how do I do that?
> 
> In other words: 'git diff --name-only A..B' lists 10 files
> but I want to merge only 5 of them.

If you are sure you don't want to merge the changes to them later on, you can do the following while on branch A

# perform the merge but do not commit git merge --no-commit B # overwrite the files you want to keep with their version from A git checkout HEAD -- file1 file2 # commit the merge result git commit

Cheers, Michael

Thomas Rast· Mar 19, 2010, 14:01 UTC · re: fkater@googlemail.com · lore

Re: merge only some of the changed files?

fkater@googlemail.com wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> If I want to merge branch B into A, however not all of the
> changed files in B, how do I do that?
> 
> In other words: 'git diff --name-only A..B' lists 10 files
> but I want to merge only 5 of them.

First of all, these are not the differences that would be merged: if you're on A and run 'git merge B', it will merge the changes since the merge-base(s) of A and B. Assuming you only have a single merge-base, this is

  git diff $(git merge-base A B) B

which you can write more conveniently (see man git-diff) as

  git diff A...B

(note the three dots!).

Second, you can't really do a "half merge" because that would be a lie. A merge promises to bring all changes from all parents, which you don't want to do. You can either split out the relevant changes from your branch (use e.g. git-cherry-pick or 'git rebase -i' on a new branch B1 started from B) on the branch, and merge that. Or you can do a "squashed merge" of only the files you want by saying e.g.

  git diff A...B -- file1 file2 | git apply

and then committing that with a suitable message.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch