Re: checkout extra files

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com> writes:

>> For this particular scenario, I do not see anything offhand that is
>> unclear about the behaviour of Git in the documentation, even though
>> as you pointed out, if the user is unaware that the shell passes
>> globs unmodified when they do not match, it may lead to a confusion
>> like this.  I certainly do not want to do a full "introduction to
>> shell" in our documentation, but if adding a short sentence or two
>> helps to avoid confusion like this, I do not strongly object to it.

Perhaps like this?

 Documentation/git-checkout.txt | 12 ++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)

diff --git i/Documentation/git-checkout.txt w/Documentation/git-checkout.txt
index 63a2516..e7272b6 100644
--- i/Documentation/git-checkout.txt
+++ w/Documentation/git-checkout.txt
@@ -360,20 +360,32 @@ mistake, and gets it back from the index.
 $ git checkout master             <1>
 $ git checkout master~2 Makefile  <2>
 $ rm -f hello.c
 $ git checkout hello.c            <3>
 ------------
 +
 <1> switch branch
 <2> take a file out of another commit
 <3> restore hello.c from the index
 +
+If you want to check out _all_ C source files out of the index,
+you can say
++
+------------
+$ git checkout -- '*.c'
+------------
++
+Note the quotes around '*.c'.  'hello.c' will also be checked
+out, even though it is no longer in the working tree, because
+the pathspec is used to match entries in the index (not in the
+working tree by your shell).
++
 If you have an unfortunate branch that is named `hello.c`, this
 step would be confused as an instruction to switch to that branch.
 You should instead write:
 +
 ------------
 $ git checkout -- hello.c
 ------------
 
 . After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct
 branch would be done using: