git merge everything except one directory

Question

I want to git merge everything except one directory. So I am thinking of doing

git add --all .
git reset /bad_directory/*
git commit -m "commit message"
git pull my_project master
git push my_project master

Is this correct? Of course I am asking because I don't want to execute this and end up screwing things up worse. Thanks.

Answer 1

One way to accomplish this is to not add the "bad_directory" to your commit, then commit all other files, then stash your changes in the "bad_directory" if you want to maintain them for later:

git add #{list of files to add}
git commit -m "commit message"
git stash
git pull origin master # consider doing a --rebase here
git push origin master

You should read up on git-stash, but later you can pop or just throw away the contents of the stash.

The problem with git-reset is I assume you will want to do a git-reset --hard, and you cannot do that on a subdirectory.