Cherry-pick
The act of selecting a single, specific commit from one branch and applying it independently to another branch.
What it is
Cherry-picking takes the exact changes introduced in one commit and duplicates them onto your current branch. Instead of merging an entire branch's history, it surgically extracts just the work from the specific commit you need.
When you would use it
You reach for cherry-pick when someone else has written a helpful commit on a different branch, and you need just that code without merging the rest of their unfinished work.
Common operations
- Pulling a specific bug fix from an experimental branch into the main branch.
- Backporting a security patch to an older release version.
Related terms
Where this is taught
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