Question

Sometimes I don’t realize I’m on the master branch in git and don’t realize it and I end up committing something to master when I want to commit it to another branch, dev.

What I’ve been doing in this case is just copy the file somewhere else, checkout dev, copy the file back, and commit.

I’m sure there is a better way of doing this isn’t there?

The dev branch is just going to be merged into master anyways. Could I just git merge master on the dev branch? There are some branch specific changes that don’t seem to get merged when I do git merge dev on master. Will those changes get messed up if I merge master into dev?

Answer 1

git cherry-pick is what you’re looking for.

Say, you committed to master revision A and want to have A on dev instead:

git checkout dev
git cherry-pick A

Done. Now, A is in dev.

We still have to get rid of A in master. If A was the last commit you did, this one will help:

git checkout master
git reset --hard HEAD~

If there are some more commits since A, you could either git rebase A~ and delete A then or – if you pushed to somewhere else – simply git revert A.