How can you undo the last git add

Question

Is it possible to unstage the last staged  not committed  change in git  Suppose there were a lot of files in the current branch  some staged  some not  At some point  some foolish programmer accidentally executed   git add --        instead of   git checkout --     Can this programmer now unstage his last changes with some magical git command  Or should he have committed before experimenting in the first place

User · Answer

Depending on size and scale of the difficultly, you could create a scratch (temporary) branch and commit the current work there.

Then switch to and checkout your original branch, and pick the appropriate files from the scratch commit.

At least you would have a permanent record of the current and previous states to work from (until you delete that scratch branch).

User · Answer

At date git prompts    use  git rm --cached  lt file gt      to unstage if files were not in the repo  It unstages the files keeping them there  use  git reset HEAD  lt file gt      to unstage if the files were in the repo  and you are adding them as modified  It keeps the files as they are  and unstages them    At my knowledge you cannot undo the git add -- but you can unstage a list of files as mentioned above

User · Answer

You can use git reset  This will  unstage  all the files you ve added after your last commit   If you want to unstage only some files  use git reset --  lt file 1 gt   lt file 2 gt   lt file n gt    Also it s possible to unstage some of the changes in files by using git reset -p

User · Answer

You cannot undo the latest git add  but you can undo all adds since the last commit  git reset without a commit argument resets the index  unstages staged changes    git reset

User · Answer

So the real answer to      Can this programmer now unstage his last changes with some magical git command    is actually  No  you cannot unstage just the last git add   That is if we interpret the question as in the following situation   Initial file   void foo         main         foo        First change followed by git add   void foo int bar        print   bar       main         foo 1337       Second change followed by git add   void foo int bar  String baz        print   bar  baz       main         foo 1337   h4x0r        In this case  git reset -p will not help  since its smallest granularity is lines  git doesn t know that about the intermediate state of   void foo int bar        print   bar       main         foo 1337       any more

User · Answer

If you want to remove all added files from git for commit  git reset   If you want to remove an individual file  git rm  lt file gt

User · Answer

You could use git reset  see docs

User · Answer

Remove the file from the index  but keep it versioned and left with uncommitted changes in working copy   git reset head  lt file gt   Reset the file to the last state from HEAD  undoing changes and removing them from the index   git reset HEAD  lt file gt  git checkout  lt file gt     If you have a   lt branch gt   named like   lt file gt    use  git checkout --  lt file gt    This is needed since git reset --hard HEAD won t work with single files  Remove  lt file gt  from index and versioning  keeping the un-versioned file with changes in working copy   git rm --cached  lt file gt   Remove  lt file gt  from working copy and versioning completely   git rm  lt file gt

User · Answer

You can use   git reset   to undo  the recently added local files    git reset file name   to undo the changes for a specific file

[git] How can you undo the last git add?

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