Unstage a deleted file in git

Question

Usually  to discard changes to a file you would do   git checkout --  lt file gt    What if the change I want to discard is deleting the file  The above line would give an error   error  pathspec   lt file gt   did not match any file s  known to git    What command will restore that single file without undoing other changes   bonus point  Also  what if the change I want to discard is adding a file  I would like to know how to unstage that change as well

User · Answer

From manual page  git-reset - Reset current HEAD to the specified state git reset  -q    lt tree-ish gt    --   lt paths gt     In the first and second form  copy entries from  lt tree-ish gt  to the index   for example  when we use git reset HEAD 1 it reset our current HEAD to HEAD 1 so when we use git reset  some-deleted-file-path  git assume  some-deleted-file-path  as some commit point and try to reset out current HEAD to there  And it ends up fail fatal  ambiguous argument  some-deleted-file-path   unknown revision or path not in the working tree

User · Answer

As of git v2 23  you have another option    git restore --staged --  lt file gt

User · Answer

If it has been staged and committed  then the following will reset the file   git reset COMMIT HASH file path git checkout COMMIT HASH file path git add file path   This will work for a deletion that occurred several commits previous

User · Answer

Both questions are answered in git status   To unstage adding a new file use git rm --cached filename ext    Changes to be committed       use  git rm --cached  lt file gt      to unstage        new file    test   To unstage deleting a file use git reset HEAD filename ext    Changes to be committed       use  git reset HEAD  lt file gt      to unstage        deleted     test   In the other hand  git checkout -- never unstage  it just discards non-staged changes

User · Answer

The answers to your two questions are related   I ll start with the second   Once you have staged a file  often with git add  though some other commands implicitly stage the changes as well  like git rm  you can back out that change with git reset --  lt file gt    In your case you must have used git rm to remove the file  which is equivalent to simply removing it with rm and then staging that change   If you first unstage it with git reset --  lt file gt  you can then recover it with git checkout --  lt file gt

User · Answer

I tried the above solutions and I was still having difficulties  I had other files staged with two files that were deleted accidentally  To undo the two deleted files I had to unstage all of the files  git reset HEAD    At that point I was able to do the checkout of the deleted items  git checkout -- WorkingFolder FileName ext  Finally I was able to restage the rest of the files and continue with my commit

User · Answer

Assuming you re wanting to undo the effects of git rm  lt file gt  or rm  lt file gt  followed by git add -A or something similar     this restores the file status in the index git reset --  lt file gt    then check out a copy from the index git checkout --  lt file gt    To undo git add  lt file gt   the first line above suffices  assuming you haven t committed yet

[git] Unstage a deleted file in git

Examples related to git

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