git checkout --theirs fails

I'm doing a rebase and got some conflicts. I just want to take their version of all files, but git checkout --theirs complains:

--ours/--theirs' cannot be used with switching branches

What gives? I'm not *trying* to switch branches. I just want to resolve the conflict by taking their version. If I try git checkout --theirs ., then it complains that not every single file in the directory has a "their" version. So? Take the ones that do.

I think for checking out files you'd need to add the file names. In case of a collision between branch name and file name, even add a double dash:

    git checkout --theirs -- file/name

That is true, but notice that the last example by Phil gives a dot as the pathspec to match all available files.

Having said that,

    $ git checkout --theirs -- file/name

would fail when the path file/name is unmerged and does not have stage #3 entry, wouldn't it? So with ".", unless all paths that match that pathspec (i.e. all available files) are either merged (i.e. without conflict) or have stage #3 entry, it is expected that the command would fail consistently to the case where a pathspec "file/name" that happens to match only one path is given, and that is the behaviour Phil saw, I would think.

Right... why is this though? Why doesn't it just check out those files that *do* have a #3 entry? And also why the nonsense about switching branches when you don't specify any path or branch?

Certainly "git checkout --theirs foo" should complain if "foo" does not have a "theirs" entry. But in your case, you are picking the entries up only via a recursive pathspec, so you'd probably be fine if _any_ entries were updated.

We do something like that in git-add, where "git add 'foo*'" will complain only if "foo*" didn't match anything. I suspect we could do the same here, but nobody has bothered to implement it.

Probably (and now I am in the realm of pure speculation) because "checkout --theirs" was intended to be done on specific paths, once you had looked at the conflicts. If you want to do a blanket "checkout --theirs .", wouldn't merging with -Xtheirs be simpler?

Because the default for checkout without any arguments has always been to "switch" branches to HEAD. That's obviously a noop, but people have long done it to see the switching message.

Nobody until now bothered to think about how that decision would interact with "--theirs". So it does _a_ logical thing, but not the one that would be most useful to you. I do not think it would be harmful to DWIM "git checkout --theirs" to "git checkout --theirs .".

-Peff