git cherry-pick does not work

Question

I get a strange error:

git cherry-pick a0cd8fe

fatal: bad revision 'a0cd8fe'

Why is that?

Note that the branch that a0cd8fe was merged to has been deleted. Is that why I get this error?

Answer 1

That is because you don't have the remote branch (from where you want to cherry-pick) locally

Solution

git fetch origin <remote_branch>
git cherry-pick <commit_id>

Answer 2

Just deleting a branch does not remove any commits. Immediately afterwards, any git command will work when given the SHA hash of a commit that was on the deleted branch. These so-called orphaned commits are eventually garbage collected after a set amount of time. From your output, it assists that this is what has happened. After garbage collection, the commit is permanently deleted.