How to unstage large number of files without deleting the content

Question

I accidentally added a lot of temporary files using git add -A  I managed to unstage the files using the following commands and managed to remove the dirty index    git ls-files -z   xargs -0 rm -f git diff --name-only --diff-filter D -z   xargs -0 git rm --cached   The above commands are listed in the git help rm  But sadly  my files were also deleted on execution  even though I had given cache option  How can I clear the index without losing the content   Also it would be helpful if someone can explain the way this pipe operation works

User · Answer

If you have a pristine repo  or HEAD isn t set  1  you could simply   rm  git index   Of course  this will require you to re-add the files that you did want to be added      1  Note  as explained in the comments  this would usually only happen when the repo is brand-new   pristine   or if no commits have been made  More technically  whenever there is no checkout or work-tree   Just making it more clear

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git reset  If all you want is to undo an overzealous  git add  run   git reset   Your changes will be unstaged and ready for you to re-add as you please     DO NOT RUN git reset --hard     It will not only unstage your added files  but will revert any changes you made in your working directory  If you created any new files in working directory  it will not delete them though

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I m afraid that the first of those command lines unconditionally deleted from the working copy all the files that are in git s staging area   The second one unstaged all the files that were tracked but have now been deleted   Unfortunately this means that you will have lost any uncommitted modifications to those files   If you want to get your working copy and index back to how they were at the last commit  you can  carefully  use the following command   git reset --hard   I say  carefully  since git reset --hard will obliterate uncommitted changes in your working copy and index   However  in this situation it sounds as if you just want to go back to the state at your last commit  and the uncommitted changes have been lost anyway   Update  it sounds from your comments on Amber s answer that you haven t yet created any commits  since HEAD cannot be resolved   so this won t help  I m afraid   As for how those pipes work  git ls-files -z and git diff --name-only --diff-filter D -z both output a list of file names separated with the byte 0    This is useful  since  unlike newlines  0 bytes are guaranteed not to occur in filenames on Unix-like systems    The program xargs essentially builds command lines from its standard input  by default by taking lines from standard input and adding them to the end of the command line   The -0 option says to expect standard input to by separated by 0 bytes   xargs may invoke the command several times to use up all the parameters from standard input  making sure that the command line never becomes too long   As a simple example  if you have a file called test txt  with the following contents   hello goodbye hello again       then the command xargs echo whatever  lt  test txt will invoke the command   echo whatever hello goodbye hello again

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If HEAD isn t set  i e   you have no commits yet  but you don t want to just blow away  git because you ve already set up other repo config you want to keep   you can also do  git rm -rf --cached     to unstage everything  This is effectively the same as sehe s solution  but avoids mucking with Git internals

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git stash  amp  amp  git stash pop

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2019 update As pointed out by others in related questions  see here  here  here  here  here  here  and here   you can now unstage  a file with git restore --staged  lt file gt   To unstage all the files in your project  run the following from the root of the repository  the command is recursive   git restore --staged    If you only want to unstage the files in a directory  navigate to it before running the above or run  git restore --staged  lt directory-path gt   Notes  git restore was introduced in July 2019 and released in version 2 23  With the --staged flag  it restores the content of the working tree from HEAD  so it does the opposite of git add and does not delete any change    This is a new command  but the behaviour of the old commands remains unchanged  So the older answers with git reset or git reset HEAD are still perfectly valid   When running git status with staged uncommitted file s   this is now what Git suggests to use to unstage file s   instead of git reset HEAD  lt file gt  as it used to prior to v2 23

User · Answer

If you want to unstage all the changes use below command   git reset --soft HEAD   In the case you want to unstage changes and revert them from the working directory   git reset --hard HEAD

User · Answer

Warning  do not use the following command unless you want to lose uncommitted work   Using git reset has been explained  but you asked for an explanation of the piped commands as well  so here goes   git ls-files -z   xargs -0 rm -f git diff --name-only --diff-filter D -z   xargs -0 git rm --cached   The command git ls-files lists all files git knows about  The option -z imposes a specific format on them  the format expected by xargs -0  which then invokes rm -f on them  which means to remove them without checking for your approval   In other words   list all files git knows about and remove your local copy    Then we get to git diff  which shows changes between different versions of items git knows about  Those can be changes between different trees  differences between local copies and remote copies  and so on  As used here  it shows the unstaged changes  the files you have changed but haven t committed yet  The option --name-only means you want the  full  file names only and --diff-filter D means you re interested in deleted files only   Hey  didn t we just delete a bunch of stuff   This then gets piped into the xargs -0 we saw before  which invokes git rm --cached on them  meaning that they get removed from the cache  while the working tree should be left alone     except that you ve just removed all files from your working tree  Now they re removed from your index as well   In other words  all changes  staged or unstaged  are gone  and your working tree is empty  Have a cry  checkout your files fresh from origin or remote  and redo your work  Curse the sadist who wrote these infernal lines  I have no clue whatsoever why anybody would want to do this     TL DR  you just hosed everything  start over and use git reset from now on

User · Answer

Use git reset HEAD to reset the index without removing files   If you only want to reset a particular file in the index  you can use git reset HEAD --  path to file to do so    The pipe operator  in a shell  takes the stdout of the process on the left and passes it as stdin to the process on the right  It s essentially the equivalent of     proc1  gt  proc1 out   proc2  lt  proc1 out   rm proc1 out   but instead it s   proc1   proc2  the second process can start getting data before the first is done outputting it  and there s no actual file involved

[git] How to unstage large number of files without deleting the content

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