git checkout branch from outside

Question

Problem: I need somehow to checkout an existing branch of a project that is already cloned locally on my file system without being in that particular folder of this project.

Answer 1

You're quite welcome to use --git-dir and --work-tree to avoid cd'ing, but honestly, it's easier just to cd. To avoid having to cd back, you can do it in a subshell:

git clone foo foo-copy
(cd foo-copy && git checkout branch)

Of course, in this specific case, you don't actually need two commands:

git clone -b  foo foo-copy