Merge, update, and pull Git branches without using checkouts

Question

I work on a project that has 2 branches, A and B. I typically work on branch A, and merge stuff from branch B. For the merging, I would typically do:

git mer         


        

Answer 1

Another way to effectively do this is:

git fetch
git branch -d branchB
git branch -t branchB origin/branchB

Because it's a lower case -d, it will only delete it if the data will still exist somewhere. It's similar to @kkoehne's answer except it doesn't force. Because of the -t it will set up the remote again.

I had a slightly different need than OP, which was to create a new feature branch off develop (or master), after merging a pull request. That can be accomplished in a one-liner without force, but it doesn't update the local develop branch. It's just a matter of checking out a new branch and having it be based off origin/develop:

git checkout -b new-feature origin/develop