Commit a single file to another branch

Question

I'm on branch feature-x doing some work, when I suddenly encounter an issue which should really be solved on another branch, hotfix.

I want to create a commit with that change, but on the hotfix branch.

From this question I understand that the standard procedure would be to

# On branch feature-x
git stash
git checkout hotfix
git stash pop
git add -A
git commit -m "Fixed issue #562"

That would work if I didn't have many changes on branch feature-x already underway, which would throw a conflict with the branch hotfix. I want to avoid having to resolve unnecessary conflicts.

To avoid that, I was thinking that I could only extract a single file from the stash, as noted on this answer. So the procedure would be:

# On branch feature-x
git stash
git checkout hotfix
git checkout stash@{0} -- <src/buggyfile.xxx>
git add -A
git commit -m "Fixed issue #562"

And then I should go back to feature-x

git checkout feature-x
git stash pop

While there's a way to bring files from another branch directly, I want to know if there's a way to send files to another branch, without all this hassle. The actual modification is only a couple characters.

Answer 1

To commit a file from feature-x to hotfix, there is an easy way to do that (assume the commit you just added on feature-x branch is 4712df727f7303bc95545d0f6a024129be97c5c2):

# on branch hotfix
git checkout 4712d filename
git commit

Answer 2

You can commit the change in feature-x and cherry-pick it in hotfix, as follows:

# On branch feature-x
git add <file>
git commit -m "Fixed issue #562" // Note commit-id
git checkout hotfix
git cherry-pick <commit-id>
git push origin hotfix

Extending the answer as per @torek comment, to use git-worktree, as follows:

git worktree add -b hotfix ../hotfix origin/master
cd ../hotfix/
git add <file>
git commit -m "Fixed issue #562"
git push origin hotfix