git cherry-pick does not show a conflict when file does not exist?

Question

I am cherry picking a commit from branch A into branch B. Branch A is many commits ahead of branch B, and I wanted to ignore a few previous commits in branch A and cherry-pick a future commit. For example, branch A has commits 1,2,3,4,5,6 and branch B has just 1,2 and I wanted to cherry-pick commit 6 from branch A into branch B. Turns out I did not realize that commit 6 changes a file introduced in commit 5(which branch B does not have). But on trying the cherry-pick of 6(to branch B), git did not show the file introduced in commit 5 as a conflict. I just lost the changes made in that file when I cherry-picked commit 6. Was that expected? Am I doing it wrong?

The command I ran was just "git cherry-pick <commit-id>"

Answer 1

Since the commit 6 has the path/file src/test/resources/RefreshedJarClassV2.txt which is not exist on branch B, when you cherry-pick commit 6 to branch B. there will show unmerged paths and you should mark this path to current working directory. Details steps as below:

If you have already cherry-pick commit 6 on branch B as below graph,

1---2---6'          Branch B
     \
      3---4---5---6 Branch A

you should reset branch B as the original by:

git checkout B
git reset --hard <commit id for 2>

Then the branch structure will looks like the original:

1---2               Branch B
     \
      3---4---5---6 Branch A

Now cherry-pick commit 6 again:

git cherry-pick <commit id for 6>
git add .
git cherry-pick --continue

And the path and file src/test/resources/RefreshedJarClassV2.txt will show in branch B.