I was working on some branching and merging with a customer and they wanted to move a file from one branch to another without taking the entire commit. I had to dig in a bit and see how to cherry pick a file, and not a commit. This post looks at how this can work.

I’ll do this in the git CLI. I’m sure it works in many clients, but when I do something strange or new, I like looking at the CLI. Mostly because when I make a mistake, the clients send me to the CLI often anyway, so I get comfortable there.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. You can see all posts on Git as well.

A Simple Setup

First, grab a repo. In this case, I had a branching/merging repo I use with customers to show some things. I’ll use the repo at: https://github.com/way0utwest/BranchMerge

For me, I have a main branch, as well as a dev and qa branches. There are likely some feature ones as well.

To start with, let’s check main. Everything is up to date (I pulled already):

Let’s also check QA. Same thing.

I’ll now make some changes on QA, adding a file and changing two others. Once I do this, here is my status, pre-commit.

If I don’t commit, these files don’t exist, and I could change branches and add them there. However, once I commit, I might want to move them in a certain way. I’ll commit and my status is clean.

Now, I could switch to main and do this to move one file:

git checkout qa -- README.md

However, I’m just doing that without review. So, I wouldn’t do that and you shouldn’t either. Instead, let’s create a PR.

Using a Branch for Peer Review

A PR is a pull request, but it also means we ask for some peer review. In my case, I’ll use this code to create a new branch and then pull in two changes: my modified readme and one of the other changes.

git checkout -b r9-qa

git checkout qa -- README.md

git checkout qa -- "V6__create proc gettwo.sql"

Ignore my typos, but I’ve run 4 commands: checkout 3 times and status once.

Now I’ll commit and push these changes to my r9-qa branch.

Once I do that, Github detects a push and asks me to create PR. I do, and I see the PR with these changes.

Now I can proceed with my flow, and my cherry picked changes are captured.

There is a git cherrypick command, but often I find I need random files from multiple commits, while ignoring others in the commit. This works well for database releases.

A few references:

• git checkout
• How to cherry pick only changes for only one file, not the whole commit
• Git cherry-pick file from another branch

SQL New Blogger

This post took my about 20 minutes to write. However the learning and experimentation took over an hour as I read various links and dug into the docs and various posts.

This is a very useful skill, and one you can discuss in an interview. Write a similar post and you’ll be prepared for this type of question in an interview.