Accidentally branched off of the wrong branch, and when I want to merge into the master I have to merge both branches

So I created a branch off of another branch I was already creating, and now when I try to merge the branches into master, I have run into the situation where I have to merge both branches.

Here is a diagram

>Master->
>> ->Branch 1 -> Branch 2

I want to be able to merge just the changes on branch 2 onto master without having to merge the changes on Branch 1 if that makes sense. I looked into reset and revert, but it seems like these things will delete all the changes I made with branch 2. Any ideas?

Thanks

Try git rebase --onto with the following syntax:

To put branch2's changes on to the master without including branch1's

git rebase --onto master branch1 branch2

Relevant output from git help rebase:

> Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to another, to > pretend that you forked the topic branch from the latter branch, using rebase --onto. > > First let’s assume your topic is based on branch next. For example, a feature > developed in topic depends on some functionality which is found in next. >
> o---o---o---o---o master >
> o---o---o---o---o next >
> o---o---o topic >
> We want to make topic forked from branch master; for example, because the functionality > on which topic depends was merged into the more stable master branch. > We want our tree to look like this: >
> o---o---o---o---o master > |
> | o'--o'--o' topic >
> o---o---o---o---o next >
> We can get this using the following command: >
> git rebase --onto master next topic

Keep in mind the risks and pitfalls of rebasing, mentioned here: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Rebasing

One way to do it is, use cherry-pick. Do a git log branch2 and find the commit id's you want and then switch to master branch using git checkout master then use git cherry-pick <commit_id>

Refer to this post for more details

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/881092/how-to-merge-a-specific-commit-in-git