Fetch a remote branch from another repo

Question

I have three machines. On the first one, repo machine1 has a develop branch that is ahead of the develop branch of the second machine, machine2. machine2 has fetched it (but not checked out), so it lives as a remote branch machine1/develop.

Now machine2 is online, but not machine1, and I'd like to get machine1/develop into the third machine machine3.

If I do git fetch machine2 on machine3, it will update remote branches for local branches of machine2, but won't get its remote branches.

How can I bring machine1/develop from machine2 to machine3, without putting machine1 online? I could stash, checkout, fetch from machine3, and unstash, but I believe there's an easier way to do this.

Answer 1

Git allows you to specify a particular reference via the refspec argument: source:destination.

In this case the command for copying the remote branch from machine2 is

git fetch machine2 refs/remotes/machine1/develop:refs/remotes/machine1/develop