从特定提交中检出特定文件会给出“错误：路径规范文件名不匹配”

Question

I'm using git on Windows.

Say I want to check out, not commit fe4fd (abbreviated to make examples shorter) but specifically file foo.html from commit fe4fd.

According to the documentation I should be able to use

git checkout fe4fd foo.html

and that should work. Or possibly

git checkout fe4fd -- foo.html

because the dashes seem to be optional.

Anyway. I'm at the right directory.

If I do a git status foo.html or git reflog foo.html etc. everything seems normal and it knows the file is there.

everything looks normal

I can do this:

git checkout fe4fd

and it works fine

I can do this:

git checkout foo.html

but I can't do

git checkout fe4fd foo.html

because every time I get

error: pathspec 'foo.html' did not match any file(s) known to git.

I've tried

• full paths from C:/whatever down to foo.html
• local paths like ./foo.html
• including the enclosing folder, like ../myrepo/foo.html
• enclosing in single and double quotes

what am I missing?

TIA.

UPDATE : https://stackoverflow.com/users/6330106/elpiekay got me to the answer. ElpieKay if you post your comment as an answer I will mark it as correct.

The answer is, at the time of that commit , the file wasn't at that path , because a parent folder had been renamed after that commit.

I figured this out by reading the documentation for git log and learning that it wouldn't follow a file's history through a path change unless you include the --follow flag.

I did what ElpieKay suggested, and the file wasn't apparently part of the commit. Which was wrong, because I knew it was. But the file I was trying to check out was, say bar/foo.html and that path didn't exist at the time of the checkout I was looking for. At the time of that checkout it was at baz/foo.html .

To prove this, I created a new baz/ folder, cd 'd to it, and checked out the file from the commit. This worked.

Answer 1

When you run git checkout [commit] -- [paths] , then the paths have to exist in that commit (to be more precise: in the tree referenced by the commit). If the file has been renamed since, you have to find the location of the file back then and use that.

Another possibility to update your working tree version of the file would be to use git show :

git show commit:old/path/to/file.ext > new/path/to/file.ext

You can use commit:./path/to/file if you require paths relative to the current directory. Otherwise, the paths are anchored to your repository root.