How do I clone into a non-empty directory?

Question

I have directory A with files matching directory B. Directory A may have other needed files. Directory B is a git repo.

I want to clone directory B to directory A but git-clone won't allow me to since the directory is non-empty.

I was hoping it would just clone .git and since all the files match I could go from there?

I can't clone into an empty directory because I have files in directory A that are not in directory B and I want to keep them.

Copying .git is not an option since I want refs to push/pull with and I don't want to set them up manually.

Is there any way to do this?

Update: I think this works, can anyone see any problems? -->

cd a

git clone --no-hardlinks --no-checkout ../b a.tmp 

mv a.tmp/.git .

rm -rf a.tmp

git unstage # apparently git thinks all the files are deleted if you don't do this

Answer 1

"origin" is noting just what you nicknamed your remote repository when you ran a command like this:

$ git remote add origin [email protected]:USERNAME/REPOSITORY-NAME.git

Now your Git knows that "origin" points to that specific repository. You could have named it "github" or "repo" or whatever you wanted.