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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLES | CONFIGURATION | SEE ALSO | GIT | COLOPHON |
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GIT-SWITCH(1) Git Manual GIT-SWITCH(1)
git-switch - Switch branches
git switch [<options>] [--no-guess] <branch>
git switch [<options>] --detach [<start-point>]
git switch [<options>] (-c|-C) <new-branch> [<start-point>]
git switch [<options>] --orphan <new-branch>
Switch to a specified branch. The working tree and the index are
updated to match the branch. All new commits will be added to the
tip of this branch.
Optionally a new branch could be created with either -c, -C,
automatically from a remote branch of same name (see --guess), or
detach the working tree from any branch with --detach, along with
switching.
Switching branches does not require a clean index and working tree
(i.e. no differences compared to HEAD). The operation is aborted
however if the operation leads to loss of local changes, unless
told otherwise with --discard-changes or --merge.
<branch>
Branch to switch to.
<new-branch>
Name for the new branch.
<start-point>
The starting point for the new branch. Specifying a
<start-point> allows you to create a branch based on some
other point in history than where HEAD currently points. (Or,
in the case of --detach, allows you to inspect and detach from
some other point.)
You can use the @{-<N>} syntax to refer to the <N>-th last
branch/commit switched to using git switch or git checkout
operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to
@{-1}. This is often used to switch quickly between two
branches, or to undo a branch switch by mistake.
As a special case, you may use <rev-a>...<rev-b> as a shortcut
for the merge base of <rev-a> and <rev-b> if there is exactly
one merge base. You can leave out at most one of <rev-a> and
<rev-b>, in which case it defaults to HEAD.
-c <new-branch>, --create <new-branch>
Create a new branch named <new-branch> starting at
<start-point> before switching to the branch. This is the
transactional equivalent of
$ git branch <new-branch>
$ git switch <new-branch>
that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless git
switch is successful (e.g., when the branch is in use in
another worktree, not just the current branch stays the same,
but the branch is not reset to the start-point, either).
-C <new-branch>, --force-create <new-branch>
Similar to --create except that if <new-branch> already
exists, it will be reset to <start-point>. This is a
convenient shortcut for:
$ git branch -f _<new-branch>_
$ git switch _<new-branch>_
-d, --detach
Switch to a commit for inspection and discardable experiments.
See the "DETACHED HEAD" section in git-checkout(1) for
details.
--guess, --no-guess
If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking
branch in exactly one remote (call it <remote>) with a
matching name, treat as equivalent to
$ git switch -c <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>
If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is
named by the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable,
we’ll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if
the <branch> isn’t unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g.
checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout remote
branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the
origin remote. See also checkout.defaultRemote in
git-config(1).
--guess is the default behavior. Use --no-guess to disable it.
The default behavior can be set via the checkout.guess
configuration variable.
-f, --force
An alias for --discard-changes.
--discard-changes
Proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from
HEAD. Both the index and working tree are restored to match
the switching target. If --recurse-submodules is specified,
submodule content is also restored to match the switching
target. This is used to throw away local changes.
-m, --merge
If you have local modifications to one or more files that are
different between the current branch and the branch to which
you are switching, the command refuses to switch branches in
order to preserve your modifications in context. However, with
this option, a three-way merge between the current branch,
your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and
you will be on the new branch.
When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for
conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you need to resolve
the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git
rm if the merge should result in deletion of the path).
--conflict=<style>
The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the
conflicting hunks are presented, overriding the
merge.conflictStyle configuration variable. Possible values
are merge (default), diff3, and zdiff3.
-q, --quiet
Quiet, suppress feedback messages.
--progress, --no-progress
Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by
default when it is attached to a terminal, unless --quiet is
specified. This flag enables progress reporting even if not
attached to a terminal, regardless of --quiet.
-t, --track[ (direct|inherit)]
When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration.
-c is implied. See --track in git-branch(1) for details.
If no -c option is given, the name of the new branch will be
derived from the remote-tracking branch, by looking at the
local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding
remote, and then stripping the initial part up to the "*".
This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when
branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even
refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given name has no slash, or
the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is
aborted. You can explicitly give a name with -c in such a
case.
--no-track
Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the
branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable is true.
--orphan <new-branch>
Create a new unborn branch, named <new-branch>. All tracked
files are removed.
--ignore-other-worktrees
git switch refuses when the wanted ref is already checked out
by another worktree. This option makes it check the ref out
anyway. In other words, the ref can be held by more than one
worktree.
--recurse-submodules, --no-recurse-submodules
Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all
active submodules according to the commit recorded in the
superproject. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used,
submodules working trees will not be updated. Just like
git-submodule(1), this will detach HEAD of the submodules.
The following command switches to the "master" branch:
$ git switch master
After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch
would be done using:
$ git switch mytopic
However, your "wrong" branch and correct "mytopic" branch may
differ in files that you have modified locally, in which case the
above switch would fail like this:
$ git switch mytopic
error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.
You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a
three-way merge:
$ git switch -m mytopic
Auto-merging frotz
After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not
registered in your index file, so git diff would show you what
changes you made since the tip of the new branch.
To switch back to the previous branch before we switched to
mytopic (i.e. "master" branch):
$ git switch -
You can grow a new branch from any commit. For example, switch to
"HEAD~3" and create branch "fixup":
$ git switch -c fixup HEAD~3
Switched to a new branch 'fixup'
If you want to start a new branch from a remote branch of the same
name:
$ git switch new-topic
Branch `new-topic` set up to track remote branch `new-topic` from `origin`
Switched to a new branch `new-topic`
To check out commit HEAD~3 for temporary inspection or experiment
without creating a new branch:
$ git switch --detach HEAD~3
HEAD is now at 9fc9555312 Merge branch 'cc/shared-index-permbits'
If it turns out whatever you have done is worth keeping, you can
always create a new name for it (without switching away):
$ git switch -c good-surprises
Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what’s found there:
checkout.defaultRemote
When you run git checkout <something> or git switch
<something> and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall
back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/<something>.
This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote
with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting
the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it
comes to disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this
to origin.
Currently this is used by git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1)
when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will
checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by
git-worktree(1) when git worktree add refers to a remote
branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like
commands or functionality in the future.
checkout.guess
Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess
option in git checkout and git switch. See git-switch(1) and
git-checkout(1).
checkout.workers
The number of parallel workers to use when updating the
working tree. The default is one, i.e. sequential execution.
If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers
as the number of logical cores available. This setting and
checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that
perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset,
sparse-checkout, etc.
Note
Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for
repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories
on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of
cores, the default sequential checkout often performs
better. The size and compression level of a repository
might also influence how well the parallel version
performs.
checkout.thresholdForParallelism
When running parallel checkout with a small number of files,
the cost of subprocess spawning and inter-process
communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This
setting allows you to define the minimum number of files for
which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is
100.
git-checkout(1), git-branch(1)
Part of the git(1) suite
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-SWITCH(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git(1), git-checkout(1), git-config(1), git-stash(1), git-switch(1), githooks(5), giteveryday(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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