git-checkout-index(1) — Linux manual page

NAME \| SYNOPSIS \| DESCRIPTION \| OPTIONS \| USING --TEMP OR --STAGE=ALL \| EXAMPLES \| GIT \| COLOPHON

GIT-CHECKOUT-INDEX(1)           Git Manual          GIT-CHECKOUT-INDEX(1)

NAME top

       git-checkout-index - Copy files from the index to the working tree

SYNOPSIS top

       git checkout-index [-u] [-q] [-a] [-f] [-n] [--prefix=<string>]
                          [--stage=<number>|all]
                          [--temp]
                          [--ignore-skip-worktree-bits]
                          [-z] [--stdin]
                          [--] [<file>...]

DESCRIPTION top

       Copies all listed files from the index to the working directory
       (not overwriting existing files).

OPTIONS top

       -u, --index
           update stat information for the checked out entries in the
           index file.

       -q, --quiet
           be quiet if files exist or are not in the index

       -f, --force
           forces overwrite of existing files

       -a, --all
           checks out all files in the index except for those with the
           skip-worktree bit set (see --ignore-skip-worktree-bits).
           Cannot be used together with explicit filenames.

       -n, --no-create
           Don’t checkout new files, only refresh files already checked
           out.

       --prefix=<string>
           When creating files, prepend <string> (usually a directory
           including a trailing /)

       --stage=<number>|all
           Instead of checking out unmerged entries, copy out the files
           from the named stage. <number> must be between 1 and 3. Note:
           --stage=all automatically implies --temp.

       --temp
           Instead of copying the files to the working directory, write
           the content to temporary files. The temporary name
           associations will be written to stdout.

       --ignore-skip-worktree-bits
           Check out all files, including those with the skip-worktree
           bit set.

       --stdin
           Instead of taking a list of paths from the command line, read
           the list of paths from the standard input. Paths are separated
           by LF (i.e. one path per line) by default.

       -z
           Only meaningful with --stdin; paths are separated with NUL
           character instead of LF.

       --
           Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

       The order of the flags used to matter, but not anymore.

       Just doing git checkout-index does nothing. You probably meant git
       checkout-index -a. And if you want to force it, you want git
       checkout-index -f -a.

       Intuitiveness is not the goal here. Repeatability is. The reason
       for the "no arguments means no work" behavior is that from scripts
       you are supposed to be able to do:

           $ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | xargs -0 git checkout-index -f --

       which will force all existing *.h files to be replaced with their
       cached copies. If an empty command line implied "all", then this
       would force-refresh everything in the index, which was not the
       point. But since git checkout-index accepts --stdin it would be
       faster to use:

           $ find . -name '*.h' -print0 | git checkout-index -f -z --stdin

       The -- is just a good idea when you know the rest will be
       filenames; it will prevent problems with a filename of, for
       example, -a. Using -- is probably a good policy in scripts.

USING --TEMP OR --STAGE=ALL top

       When --temp is used (or implied by --stage=all) git checkout-index
       will create a temporary file for each index entry being checked
       out. The index will not be updated with stat information. These
       options can be useful if the caller needs all stages of all
       unmerged entries so that the unmerged files can be processed by an
       external merge tool.

       A listing will be written to stdout providing the association of
       temporary file names to tracked path names. The listing format has
       two variations:

        1. tempname TAB path RS

           The first format is what gets used when --stage is omitted or
           is not --stage=all. The field tempname is the temporary file
           name holding the file content and path is the tracked path
           name in the index. Only the requested entries are output.

        2. stage1temp SP stage2temp SP stage3tmp TAB path RS

           The second format is what gets used when --stage=all. The
           three stage temporary fields (stage1temp, stage2temp,
           stage3temp) list the name of the temporary file if there is a
           stage entry in the index or . if there is no stage entry.
           Paths which only have a stage 0 entry will always be omitted
           from the output.

       In both formats RS (the record separator) is newline by default
       but will be the null byte if -z was passed on the command line.
       The temporary file names are always safe strings; they will never
       contain directory separators or whitespace characters. The path
       field is always relative to the current directory and the
       temporary file names are always relative to the top level
       directory.

       If the object being copied out to a temporary file is a symbolic
       link the content of the link will be written to a normal file. It
       is up to the end-user or the Porcelain to make use of this
       information.

EXAMPLES top

       To update and refresh only the files already checked out

               $ git checkout-index -n -f -a && git update-index --ignore-missing --refresh

       Using git checkout-index to "export an entire tree"
           The prefix ability basically makes it trivial to use git
           checkout-index as an "export as tree" function. Just read the
           desired tree into the index, and do:

               $ git checkout-index --prefix=git-export-dir/ -a

           git checkout-index will "export" the index into the specified
           directory.

           The final "/" is important. The exported name is literally
           just prefixed with the specified string. Contrast this with
           the following example.

       Export files with a prefix

               $ git checkout-index --prefix=.merged- Makefile

           This will check out the currently cached copy of Makefile into
           the file .merged-Makefile.

GIT top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
       system) project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.  (At that time,
       the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2025-08-07.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Git 2.51.0.rc1                  2025-08-07          GIT-CHECKOUT-INDEX(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-read-tree(1)