How do I clone into a non-empty directory?

Question

I have directory A with files matching directory B. Directory A may have other needed files. Directory B is a git repo.

I want to clone directory B to directory A bu

Answer 1

In the following shell commands existing-dir is a directory whose contents match the tracked files in the repo-to-clone git repository.

# Clone just the repository's .git folder (excluding files as they are already in
# `existing-dir`) into an empty temporary directory
git clone --no-checkout repo-to-clone existing-dir/existing-dir.tmp # might want --no-hardlinks for cloning local repo

# Move the .git folder to the directory with the files.
# This makes `existing-dir` a git repo.
mv existing-dir/existing-dir.tmp/.git existing-dir/

# Delete the temporary directory
rmdir existing-dir/existing-dir.tmp
cd existing-dir

# git thinks all files are deleted, this reverts the state of the repo to HEAD.
# WARNING: any local changes to the files will be lost.
git reset --hard HEAD