git - pulling from specific branch

See the git-pull man page:

git pull [options] [<repository> [<refspec>...]]

and in the examples section:

Merge into the current branch the remote branch next:

$ git pull origin next

So I imagine you want to do something like:

git pull origin dev

To set it up so that it does this by default while you're on the dev branch:

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/dev dev

if you want to pull from a specific branch all you have to do is

git pull 'remote_name' 'branch_name'

NOTE: Make sure you commit your code first.

Here is what you need to do. First make sure you are in branch that you don't want to pull. For example if you have master and develop branch, and you are trying to pull develop branch then stay in master branch.

git checkout master

Then,

git pull origin develop

It's often clearer to separate the two actions git pull does. The first thing it does is update the local tracking branc that corresponds to the remote branch. This can be done with git fetch. The second is that it then merges in changes, which can of course be done with git merge, though other options such as git rebase are occasionally useful.