I have an old branch which no longer exists locally called MDM-991/feature-pilot. This branch is was created in 2021. I have a new branch called MDM-1112 created from the master. I want to recover a file which has undergone lots of changes from the old MDM-991/feature-pilot branch . I did a checkout of the old branch and tried the following to get the old file but it did not work:
> git checkout MDM-1112
> cd mdm-flow-control-plane
> git checkout MDM-991/feature-pilot src/main/java/com/mdm/flows/planar/FlowControlPlane.java
That is the correct path for the file when I run an ls -al command. I can navigate to it by typing at the command prompt
cd src/main/java/com/mdm/flows/planar and see the file. However,
git checkout MDM-991/feature-pilot src/main/java/com/mdm/flows/planar/FlowControlPlane.java
fails with the error:
error: pathspec 'src/main/java/com/mdm/flows/planar/FlowControlPlane.java' did not match any file(s) known to git
How is that possible? What am I doing wrong?
Why are you referring to a branch that doesn't exist?
If this branch is still in the remote repository, you need to reference it
git fetch origin
git checkout remote/origin/MDM-991/feature-pilot -- src/main/java/com/mdm/flows/planar/FlowControlPlane.java