Question

A friend is stuck with an old version of Git (I think he said 1.5?), where he says the -b <branch> option is not supported. I can’t wrap my head around it, so I really hope someone could help:

What would be the equivalent of the following command, without using -b?

git clone -b $BRANCH $REPO

EDIT: I originally asked for git checkout – that’s not what I meant. Sorry!

Answer 1

in older git this required two steps:

git branch $BRANCH $FROM_COMMIT
git checkout $BRANCH

notice i used $FROM_COMMIT, $REPO in your question looks odd and misleading – you can only create branches from commits, not from other repositories.

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editing my answer, since the question was altered. reading the manpage for git clone, we can see that

-b

Instead of pointing the newly created HEAD to the branch pointed to by the cloned repository’s HEAD, point to branch instead. In a non-bare repository, this is the branch that will be checked out.

to achieve this effect with an older git version we would use:

git clone $REPO
git branch $BRANCH origin/$BRANCH
git checkout $BRANCH

this will set your local HEAD to the newly created $BRANCH which is pointing to origin/$BRANCH

(hopefully i’m not mistaken – i don’t have a git install here to test …)