What did I just do with my git repository?

Question

I cloned a git repo and it had, among many others, these two remote branches:

1. master
2. origin/foo-bar

When I cloned it, I was on master. I wanted to switch to the foo-bar branch, ie I wanted to get the code from the remote origin/foo-bar branch into a local branch of the name foo-bar , so I did:

$ git checkout foo-bar

Note that I wasn't sure if I was to say git checkout origin/foo-bar or just git checkout foo-bar .

Now, I am wondering which of the two did I end up doing?

1. Did I just create a new local branch named foo=bar with all the contents of the master branch? OR

2. Did I create a new branch named foo-bar and automatically pull all contents from the remote origin/foo-bar into it?

3. If I did the wrong thing, ie I actually wanted to do #2 but if I did something else, how do I delete this local branch named foo-bar ?

Answer 1

Note that I wasn't sure if I was to say git checkout origin/foo-bar or just git checkout foo-bar .

Both of these are valid, but they mean different things. Tl;dr, you wanted the latter in this case.

origin/foo-bar (where origin in this case is the name of a remote) is a so-called remote tracking branch. Remote tracking branches are read-only and cannot be checked out, so git checkout origin/foo-bar will detach HEAD and set it to the commit that origin/foo-bar refers to.

git checkout foo-bar checks out the branch foo-bar if it exists, or it creates it anew as described below.

1. Did I just create a new local branch named foo-bar with all the contents of the master branch?

If your version of Git is not ancient, by default git checkout foo-bar will create branch foo-bar and set it up to track in your case origin/foo-bar .

This behaviour is documented in the man page for git-checkout .

2. Did I create a new branch named foo-bar and automatically pull all contents from the remote origin/foo-bar into it?

See 1.

3. If I did the wrong thing, ie I actually wanted to do #2 but if I did something else, how do I delete this local branch named foo-bar?

To delete a branch, check out a different branch (eg git checkout master ) and then do git branch -d foo-bar .

See man page for git-branch .