git fetch branches with specified prefix

Question

I have following branches in remote origin.

ft_d_feature_abc
ft_d_feature_xyz
ft_d_feature_lam
ft_d_feature_ton
ft_m_feature_mak
ft_m_feature_echo
ft_m_feature_laa
ft_m_feature_pol

I want to fetch branches which are starting with ft_d. How can I achieve this with git fetch? My Git version is 1.7.9.5.

Answer 1

Since Git version 2.6, you can specify partial substrings (with simple glob-style matching) in a fetch or push refspec. Hence:

git fetch origin 'refs/heads/ft_d*:refs/remotes/origin/ft_d*'

would do what you are asking for. Generalized regular expressions are not available, nor generalized globs: only the one specific case of * matching everything between two fixed strings is allowed. (Some fixed strings here may be empty. Usually the back half is, i.e., we usually fetch refs/heads/*, not refs/heads/*x to get just branches whose name ends in x.)

If your Git is older than 2.6, there is no simple way to do this in one fetch. You will need multiple fetches, in a loop, and you will need to do your own name-matching, perhaps using the output from git ls-remote.

(Of course, git fetch origin will normally just bring everything over, as specified in the remote.origin.fetch configuration entry or entries, and in most cases there's little point in constraining git fetch this way. Are you sure you want to bother?)

Answer 2

I'm not sure Git supports regexes for fetching a branch, however, you can create a simple script that does it for you:

for i in {1..3};
do
    git fetch origin ft_d_feature$i
done