Jason Rudolph has a great blog post on merging files from one branch to another in git. In most cases you probably want to cherry-pick commits, however for a quick and fast solution this is pretty cool:

$ git branch
* master
  twitter_integration
$ git checkout twitter_integration app/avatar.rb
$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#   new file:   app/models/avatar.rb
#
$ git commit -m "'Merge' avatar code from 'twitter_integration' branch"
[master]: created 4d3e37b: "'Merge' avatar code from 'twitter_integration' branch"
1 file changed, 72 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Two things i noticed about this method:

• Wildcards and directories work too. So instead of getting a single file from another branch you can also do a git checkout branch * or git checkout branch path/to/directory
• All paths are relative, so if you’re not in the root of a repo, you need to give the relative path to your file(s).

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11 comments

• Anonymous 2018-03-28 on 12:24

  How is master:app/avatar.rb checked out as twitter_integration:app/models/avatar.rb ?

• gituser 2018-07-25 on 10:19

  It’s not merging the file. It just replaces/overwrites the file.

• Anonymous 2018-09-13 on 00:41

  it is replacing the file not merging

• Anonymous 2018-09-24 on 20:40

  git checkout –patch twitter_integration app/avatar.rb

  ^— this will handle the situation where avatar.rb already exists in the current branch, and allow interactive merging

• Anonymous 2018-10-02 on 19:34

  What about removed files?

• jmcmillan 2019-05-20 on 16:16

  Thanks for this – I love it when the first google search is exactly the answer you wanted (How can I checkout just a specific file/folder from another branch?)

  Thanks for sharing this.

• Guilherme 2019-05-28 on 17:40

  thanks a lot

• Awesome Post and very helpful 2020-02-10 on 04:29

  Thank You

• smilyanp 2020-03-06 on 10:06

  This has been very useful for our team, thanks for sharing!

• Anonymous 2020-05-21 on 11:27

  This won’t merge the file, it will replace it instead.

• Anonymous 2021-06-28 on 13:47

  Be aware. It will overwrite the existing files. So its not a merge. If we use this we should be again carefully check and revert back few parts of the file.