Git: cannot checkout branch - error: pathspec '…' did not match any file(s) known to git

Question

I\'m not sure why I\'m unable to checkout a branch that I had worked on earlier. See the commands below (note: co is an alias for checkou

Answer 1

I encountered this same issue when I was first playing around with git. When attempting my first commit...

git commit -m 'first commit!'

I got the error mentioned by the OP...

error: pathspec 'commit!'' did not match any file(s) known to git.

I thought I might have been confusing git by using a keyword in the commit message, so I tried a few other words and received the same error.

Finally I used double-quotes in the message...

git commit -m "first commit!"

This turned out to be successful...

[master (root commit) 0000000] first commit!
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 dummyDoc.txt