How do you fetch a remote branch without "checking it out"

Question

I am working on a branch "branch-A" and using the command git branch I can see that its the only branch locally.

If I use git branch -a I can see the remote copy of "remotes/origin/branch-B"

What I want to do is bring branch-B locally, but I don't want to actually check it out... I mean I could do that and then checkout my other branch to go back, but its slightly more painful since I am doing this to lots of repos.

I was thinking some sort of fetch? but I can't figure out how to phrase the command. Is it possible?

So I have:

user@pc> git branch
* branch-A
  master

and

user@pc> git branch -a
* branch-A
  remotes/origin/branch-B
  remotes/origin/branch-A
  remotes/origin/master

I want to be able to get:

user@pc> git branch
* branch-A
  branch-B
  master

Answer 1

You can do this, one liner very simple.

git fetch <remote> <srcBranch>:<destBranch>

this will avoid to checkout the remote branch.

See this question for more information:

Merge, update, and pull Git branches without using checkouts

Answer 2

I think there's some ambiguity about what "bring branch-B locally" means.

If you see origin/branch-B then you already have it locally. The commits, the trees they contain, the files they contain... all are already in your local repo. The only thing you don't have is a local branch (branch-B) tracking the remote branch (origin/branch-B).

If you don't want to check branch-B out, then there aren't a lot of reasons to create the local branch. Just about anything you can do with a local branch, you can do with the remote branch reference. e.g.:

git merge origin/branch_B

But if you want one, you can create it:

git branch --set-upstream branch_B origin/branch_B