threads / discuss / 24964

Checking out a branch in another directory

Subject: Checking out a branch in another directory

## tl;dr

2 messages between Sep 3, 2010 and Sep 3, 2010.

replies: 1people: 2as markdown or json

Luben Tuikov· Sep 3, 2010, 22:10 UTC · lore

I'd like to checkout a branch and work on it and so on, but *in another directory*.  I wasn't able to accomplish this with git clone, as I can see that refs/heads were NOT shared as also indicated by .git/config, local and/or shared.

Is there official tools to do this in master?

I basically want to eliminate having to do git-checkout <branch> and instead simply do a cd ../<branch>, but really have just a single history.

For the last 4 years, I've been using a home-brewed git-mkdir-of-branch.sh from a local branch, which basically creates a bunch of symlinks and then runs git-read-tree HEAD; git-checkout-index -u -q -f -a.

   Luben

Jonathan Nieder· Sep 3, 2010, 22:23 UTC · re: Luben Tuikov · lore

Re: Checking out a branch in another directory

Hi Luben,

Luben Tuikov wrote:

> For the last 4 years, I've been using a home-brewed
> git-mkdir-of-branch.sh from a local branch, which basically creates
> a bunch of symlinks and then runs git-read-tree HEAD;
> git-checkout-index -u -q -f -a.

You might like contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir (shipped in /usr/share/doc/git by most distros).

An occasional topic has been how to integrate this functionality into "git clone". See [1], for example.

Good luck, Jonathan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/150559/focus=151247