Merging/Copying Specific files to master from Branch

Question

I run following command to find file names that were changes in branch but NOT in master:

git diff --name-status master..branchName

It gives a list of file names with full path.

Now I have cloned master on local machine and want to copy, those changed files in master. I said copy as I don't want to merge and run into conflicts.

Is there a way to get some kind of patch which have files in relevant folders? instead of manually copying them?

Answer 1

You can just redirect output of the git diff command to a file.

$ git diff master..branchName -- the/relevant/path1 the/relevant/path2 ... > my.patch

Then use git apply my.patch to apply the changes all at once.

Another option is to checkout the files/directories that you want:

$ git checkout master
$ git chechout branchName -- the/relevant/path1 the/relevant/path2 ...

Answer 2

What you want is to have the working directory and index of your branch and your repository pointing to master commit.

The way to do that is with git-reset :

git checkout yourBranch
git branch tempBranch   // It is allways safer create a temporal branch when you play with git-reset
git reset --soft master // This moves to master commit but does not touch your working directory and index area.