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

On Windows OS by default git is instaled with

core.ignorecase = true

This means that git repo files will be case insensitive, to change this you need to execute:

\yourLocalRepo> git config core.ignorecase false

you can find this configuration on .git\config file

Answer 2

Happened to me after renaming an uncommitted file in Android Studio.

Git seemed to have the old version in its repository, even if it didn´t exist anymore.

fetch, pull, checkout, add all and so on did not help in my case!

So I opened the Git GUI of TortoiseGit which showed me the exact file that caused trouble.

Afterwards I deleted the file from the repository with

git rm -r --cached /path/to/affected/file

and the problem was gone

Answer 3

check whether it is not a typo in the target file name. I was attempting to stage by typing

git add includes/connection..php

But I did not notice that I was using two dots But then I type

git add includes/connection.php

It works

Answer 4

I got this error for a branch that was remote and had no local tracking branch. Even though I'm certain I've checked out remote branches via a simple

git checkout feature/foo

in the past, to get around this error I had to

git checkout -t -b feature/foo origin/feature/foo

I have no idea what I did to get myself into that situation either.

Answer 5

I fixed it by modifying my git config file Check your the config file in your git directory - .git\config

It previously had

[remote "origin"]
url = http://git.xyz.com/abc-group/pqr.git
fetch = +refs/heads/develop:refs/remotes/origin/develop

I fixed by modifying it to

[remote "origin"]
url = http://git.xyz.com/abc-group/pqr.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Notice the head was pointing to only one branch, so it couldnt find the reference to other existing branches, I changed it to * so it checks everything in origin.

Answer 6

git pull

That simply fixed it for me :)