Question

I think this command below, will checkout a remote branch name ‘branch_name’ and create a local branch for me called ‘branch_name’.

'git checkout -b branch_name "`git remote`"/branch_name'

My question is

• how can I run this despite I already has a branch name ‘branch_name’, can I ask git it checkout to branch_name even (if that branch already exist)?

• when I do ‘git branch -a’, I don’t see a branch ‘remote/branch_name’, I only see a branch ‘remotes/ser-git/branch_name’. How can git find the right remove branch from ‘git remtoe’/branch_name?

Answer 1

how can I run this despite I already has a branch name ‘branch_name’,
can I ask git it checkout to branch_name even (if that branch already
exist)?

Use -B option instead of -b

when I do ‘git branch -a’, I don’t see a branch ‘remote/branch_name’,
I only see a branch ‘remotes/ser-git/branch_name’. How can git find
the right remove branch from ‘git remtoe’/branch_name?

git resolves reference name in the following order:

1. If $GIT_DIR/<name> exists, that is what you mean (this is usually useful only for HEAD, FETCH_HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, MERGE_HEAD and CHERRY_PICK_HEAD);
2. otherwise, refs/<name> if it exists;
3. otherwise, refs/tags/<refname> if it exists;
4. otherwise, refs/heads/<name> if it exists;
5. otherwise, refs/remotes/<name> if it exists; <- this is your case
6. otherwise, refs/remotes/<name>/HEAD if it exists.

It means that if you have local branch ser-git/branch_name, it will be preferred by git instead of remote branch.