Is there a way in git to checkout all files except 1 or 2?

Question

Sometimes I find myself in the position where I want to dump everything in my working tree except for 1 or 2 files. Is there an easy way to do this? As it is I've been manually typing git checkout .... for all the files I want to checkout from the index and don't include the files I want to keep but that's pretty laborious.

Another way I could think of doing this would be to stash 1 or 2 files I want to keep, then "checkout ." then restore the stash. Would that be a good way to do this?

Answer 1

I want to do the same occasionally and usually go with the following set of commands (assumes than there is nothing in the index):

git add file-to-preserve-1 file-to-preserve-2
git stash save --keep-index "Changes discarded because ..."
# git stash drop # think twice before running this command
git reset

In words:

1. Put files you need to preserve to index.
2. Stash everything (possibly with a meaningful message), but leave index untouched.
3. Drop stashed changes (only if you sure they are useless).
4. Reset the index.

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Another way I can think of (didn't try it actually, the first one works fine for me):

git update-index --skip-worktree file-to-preserve-1 file-to-preserve-2
git checkout .
git update-index --no-skip-worktree file-to-preserve-1 file-to-preserve-2

Explained:

1. Command git to ignore some files.
2. Checkout everything in the current directory.
3. Tell git to treat files from 1 as usual again.