"Julia Evans" <julia@xxxxxxx> writes: > Do you think that the concept of a "pathspec" is especially useful/powerful > in the case of `git checkout`? In a project that organizes its files reasonably cleanly, after doing a random explory development to reach a good stopping point, a user would realize that changes to subdirectory X and Y are good but changes to subdirectory Z are all useless, in which case of course "git checkout Z" (from the index, if you haven't done 'git add' to record interim state to the index), or "git checkout HEAD Z" (to get back to the pristine state) would be especially useful/powerful. Of course, all the commands that take pathspec gain its benefits equally well, like "git grep -e pattern ':!not-here/'" to find pattern from everywhere except somewhere, "git log -p Doc/" to see changes that touched subset of paths, "git reset Z/" to undo earlier series of "git add"s only for the specified subset of paths. If you are trying to find a command that new people are likely to first benefit from pathspec, I tend to think 'checkout' is not one of them. Be it 'reset' or 'checkout', the form with pathspec is typically used to undo the effect of earlier 'add' with pathspec, so in that sense, if we want to give a quick tutorial for pathspec to newbies in the documentation for a single command, 'add' probably is more appropriate than 'checkout'.
