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 got the same problem because I used git clone --depth=1, which implies --single-branch.

Do a completed git clone will fix it.

Answer 2

In my case I had renamed a file changing the case of the file, i.e. SomeFile.js -> someFile.js

I think that was related to the problem. Doing a git fetch didn't fix the issue.

I moved the files out of my project, did a fetch, and did a push without them. Then I did a fetch, added them back, and did a push, and it worked. I don't know if all those steps were needed, but it did ultimately work.

Answer 3

I got this when I did the following:

• Used IntelliJ IDE, connected to git
• Created a new file, and added to git
• Renamed the new file

When I tried to check in the directory, I got this error.

To fix:

I opened the repo in git extensions. I saw that the file (with the old name) was staged. But since it didnt exist anymore, it could not be committed.

I simply unstaged this file.

Then I re-added the file (this time correctly named) into git and committed without errors.

Answer 4

I had made a silly mistake of not providing -m flag while committing (lol happens)

git commit -m "commit message in here"

Answer 5

First, checkout parent branch.Then type

git fetch --all --prune 
git checkout <your branch>

Hope it helps!.

Answer 6

I had a different root cause

I had a script that basically searches all branches matching jira issue key in the for "PRJ-1234" among all branches to execute a git branch checkout command on the matching branch

The problem in my case was 2 or more branches shared the same jira key and hence caused my script to fail with the aforementioned error

By deleting the old unused branch and making sure only a single branch had the jira key reference fixed the problem

Here's my code in case someone wants to use it

git remote update
git fetch --all --prune 
git branch -r --list *$1* | xargs git checkout --force

save this as switchbranch.sh

Then use it from the terminal ./switchbranch.sh PRJ-1234