How to git reset --hard a subdirectory

Question

UPDATE    With Git 2 23  August 2019   there s a new command git restore that does this  see the accepted answer       UPDATE  This will work more intuitively as of Git 1 8 3  see my own answer    Imagine the following use case  I want to get rid of all changes in a specific subdirectory of my Git working tree  leaving all other subdirectories intact    I can do git checkout     but git checkout   adds directories excluded by sparse checkout There is git reset --hard  but it won t let me do it for a subdirectory     gt  git reset --hard   fatal  Cannot do hard reset with paths    Again  Why git can  39 t do hard soft resets by path  I can reverse-patch the current state using git diff subdir   patch -p1 -R  but this is a rather weird way of doing this    What is the proper Git command for this operation   The script below illustrates the problem  Insert the proper command below the How to make files comment -- the current command will restore the file a c ac which is supposed to be excluded by the sparse checkout  Note that I do not want to explicitly restore a a and a b  I only  know  a and want to restore everything below  EDIT  And I also don t  know  b  or which other directories reside on the same level as a      bin sh  rm -rf repo  git init repo  cd repo for f in a b  do   for g in a b c  do     mkdir -p  f  g     touch  f  g  f g     git add  f  g     git commit -m  added  f  g    done done git config core sparsecheckout true echo a a  gt   git info sparse-checkout echo a b  gt  gt   git info sparse-checkout echo b a  gt  gt   git info sparse-checkout git read-tree -m -u HEAD echo  After read-tree   find   -type f  rm a a aa rm a b ab echo  gt  gt  b a ba echo  After modifying   find   -type f git status    How to make files a   reappear without changing b and without recreating a c  git checkout -- a  echo  After checkout   git status find   -type f

User · Answer

According to Git developer Duy Nguyen who kindly implemented the feature and a compatibility switch, the following works as expected as of Git 1.8.3:

git checkout -- a

(where a is the directory you want to hard-reset). The original behavior can be accessed via

git checkout --ignore-skip-worktree-bits -- a

User · Answer

A reset will normally change everything  but you can use git stash to pick what you want to keep  As you mentioned  stash doesn t accept a path directly  but it can still be used to keep a specific path with the --keep-index flag  In your example  you would stash the b directory  then reset everything else      How to make files a   reappear without changing b and without recreating a c  git add b                add the directory you want to keep git stash --keep-index   stash anything that isn t added git reset                unstage the b directory git stash drop           clean up the stash  optional    This gets you to a point where the last part of your script will output this    After checkout    On branch master   Changes not staged for commit        modified    b a ba   no changes added to commit  use  git add  and or  git commit -a   a a aa a b ab b a ba   I believe this was the target result  b remains modified  a   files are back  a c is not recreated     This approach has the added benefit of being very flexible  you can get as fine-grained as you want adding specific files  but not other ones  in a directory

User · Answer

Try changing  git checkout -- a   to  git checkout --  git ls-files -m -- a    Since version 1 7 0  Git s ls-files honors the skip-worktree flag   Running your test script  with some minor tweaks changing git commit    to git commit -q and git status to git status --short  outputs   Initialized empty Git repository in  home user repo  git  After read-tree  a a aa a b ab b a ba After modifying  b a ba  D a a aa  D a b ab  M b a ba After checkout   M b a ba a a aa a c ac a b ab b a ba   Running your test script with the proposed checkout change outputs   Initialized empty Git repository in  home user repo  git  After read-tree  a a aa a b ab b a ba After modifying  b a ba  D a a aa  D a b ab  M b a ba After checkout   M b a ba a a aa a b ab b a ba

User · Answer

For the case of simply discarding changes  the git checkout -- path  or git checkout HEAD -- path  commands suggested by other answers work great  However  when you wish to reset a directory to a revision other than HEAD  that solution has a significant problem  it doesn t remove files which were deleted in the target revision   So instead  I have begun using the following command      git diff --cached commit -- subdir   git apply -R --index   This works by finding the diff between the target commit and the index  then applying that diff in reverse to the working directory and index  Basically  this means that it makes the contents of the index match the contents of the revision you specified  The fact that git diff takes a path argument allows you to limit this effect to a specific file or directory   Since this command fairly long and I plan on using it frequently  I have set up an alias for it which I named reset-checkout   git config --global alias reset-checkout   f     git diff --cached        git apply -R --index     f    You can use it like this   git reset-checkout 451a9a4 -- path to directory   Or just   git reset-checkout 451a9a4

User · Answer

With Git 2 23  August 2019   you have the new command git restore  git restore --source HEAD --staged --worktree -- aDirectory   or  shorter git restore -s  -SW  -- aDirectory   That would replace both the index and working tree with HEAD content  like an reset --hard would  but for a specific path     Original answer  2013    Note  as commented by Dan Fabulich  that    git checkout --  lt path gt  doesn t do a hard reset  it replaces the working tree contents with the staged contents    git checkout HEAD --  lt path gt  does a hard reset for a path  replacing both the index and the working tree with the version from the HEAD commit    As answered by Ajedi32  both checkout forms don t remove files which were deleted in the target revision  If you have extra files in the working tree which don t exist in HEAD  a git checkout HEAD --  lt path gt  won t remove them   Note  With git checkout --overlay HEAD --  lt path gt   Git 2 22  Q1 2019    files that appear in the index and working tree  but not in  lt tree-ish gt  are removed  to make them match  lt tree-ish gt  exactly    But that checkout can respect a git update-index --skip-worktree  for those directories you want to ignore   as mentioned in  Why do excluded files keep reappearing in my git sparse checkout

User · Answer

What about  subdir thesubdir for fn in   find  subdir   do   git ls-files --error-unmatch  fn 2 gt  dev null  gt  dev null    if           1     then     continue    fi   echo  Restoring  fn     git show HEAD  fn  gt   fn  done

User · Answer

Ajedi32 s answer is what I was looking for but for some commits I ran into this error   error  cannot apply binary patch to  path to directory  without full index line  May be because some files of the directory are binary files  Adding  --binary  option to the git diff command fixed it   git diff --binary --cached commit -- path to directory   git apply -R --index

User · Answer

I m going to offer a terrible option here  since I have no idea how to do anything with git except add commit and push  here s how I  reverted  a subdirectory   I started a new repository on my local pc  reverted the whole thing to the commit I wanted to copy code from and then copied those files over to my working directory  add commit push et voila  Don t hate the player  hate Mr Torvalds for being smarter than us all

User · Answer

If the size of the subdirectory is not particularly huge  AND you wish to stay away from the CLI  here s a quick solution to manually reset the sub-directory    Switch to master branch and copy the sub-directory to be reset  Now switch back to your feature branch and replace the sub-directory with the copy you just created in step 1  Commit the changes    Cheers  You just manually reset a sub-directory in your feature branch to be same as that of master branch

[git] How to git reset --hard a subdirectory?

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