A single command to git pull a branch?

Question

For example, I'm now in develop branch, and want to pull remote master to local master, what I do is:

$ git stash
$ git checkout master
$ git pull
$ git checkout develop
$ git merge master

Question 1: How to pull remote master to local master when I in develop branch?

Question 2: Is it possible to merge remote master to local develop in one command? currently I use 4 commands

Answer 1

Answer-1: Your working procedure is ok for question-1.

$ git fetch
$ git stash
$ git checkout master
$ git pull origin master

$ git checkout develop
$ git stash apply

Answer-2: You can pull origin/master into your local develop branch directly.

$ git pull origin master

Answer 2

There are already other good answers to your question 2 (see sajib's). The short answer to question 1 is, "You can't".

However, If I can rephrase your question slightly to: "How can I pull remote master onto master while keeping develop checked out?" then you can use git worktree to your advantage. It gives you another working tree to do all the normal things you'd do with a working tree.

If you're on the develop branch and want to update master, for example:

git worktree add ../second-repo master
git -C ../second-repo merge origin master

Now master has been updated in your local repo.

To explain the above commands, git worktree will checkout master into another folder (../second-repo). The second command will execute git merge origin master only after virtually changing directories to the new worktree. Note that once you have a worktree set up, there's no need set it up again. You can just keep using the same worktree to update master.