Git: cannot checkout branch - error: pathspec '…' did not match any file(s) known to git

Question

I\'m not sure why I\'m unable to checkout a branch that I had worked on earlier. See the commands below (note: co is an alias for checkou

Answer 1

I had the same issue.. I thought I had branch named foo when I try to:

git checkout foo

I was getting:

error: pathspec 'foo' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Then I tried the full branch name:

git checkout feature/foo

then worked for me.

Answer 2

I have the same questions, and got some information from this link: git fetch doesn't fetch all branches

So now, I may not sure how this situation happened, at least we can solve it:

Step 1. Check your "remote.origin.fetch" setting, should be like this

$ git config --get remote.origin.fetch

+refs/heads/private_dev_branch:refs/remotes/origin/private_dev_branch

Step 2. Change "remote.origin.fetch" to fetch everything

$ git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"

$ git config --get remote.origin.fetch

+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Then, you can try "git pull" (maybe "git fetch origin" also works but I didn't try) to get all the branch.

Answer 3

If branch name and you dont have any uncommited file, then try this

git fetch && git checkout <branch name>

Answer 4

Try git fetch so that your local repository gets all the new info from github. It just takes the information about new branches and no actual code. After that the git checkout should work fine.

Answer 5

I got this error when trying to checkout a branch via:

git checkout branchX

which I had not checked out before. It only worked when explicitly stating the remote:

git checkout --track origin/branchX

The reason for this was, that I had 2 different remotes (origin + sth. else) configured in git config. As I didn't need the second remote, I removed it and voilá, it worked. The alternative to set the default remote via:

checkout.defaultRemote=origin

did not work for me

Answer 6

In my case I have TWO branch 1) master(which is for live server) 2) dev(test server). I had set multiple remote to push code on respective server. When I tried to switch branch I got the error like error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.

You can see them by git remote -v. I had removed other remote except origin remote by git remote remove <remote-name>

Then git fetch

Now I am able to checkout branch by git checkout <branch-name>.