Checkout old commit and make it a new commit

Question

On Git  say I mess up my commits  and I want to make the version 3 commits ago as the new version  If I do git checkout xxxx  it creates a new branch and it seems like I can only merge it  Could I make this the new  master version    I want   A-B-C-D-E   to become  A-B-C-D-E-F   where F has exactly the same content as C  If I use git revert xxxx instead  it seems like it definitely will have conflicts and I need to manually resolve it   What I really want is just make the old commit at some point the new commit  regardless of what s in my working directory or the latest commit   How would I go about doing this

User · Accepted Answer

git rm -r   git checkout HEAD 3   git commit   After the commit  files in the new HEAD will be the same as they were in the revision HEAD 3

User · Answer

git cherry-pick C  where C is the commit hash for C  This applies the old commit on top of the newest one

User · Answer

eloone did it file by file with  git checkout  lt commit-hash gt   lt filename gt    but you could checkout all files more easily by doing  git checkout  lt commit-hash gt

User · Answer

The other answers so far create new commits that undo what is in older commits   It is possible to go back and  change history  as it were  but this can be a bit dangerous   You should only do this if the commit you re changing has not been pushed to other repositories   The command you re looking for is git rebase --interactive  If you want to change HEAD 3  the command you want to issue is git rebase --interactive HEAD 4   This will open a text editor and allow you to specify which commits you want to change   Practice on a different repository before you try this with something important   The man pages should give you all the rest of the information you need

User · Answer

This is exactly what I wanted to do  I was not sure of the previous command git cherry-pick C  it sounds nice but it seems you do this to get changes from another branch but not on same branch  has anyone tried it   So I did something else which also worked    I got the files I wanted back from the old commit file by file  git checkout  lt commit-hash gt   lt filename gt    ex        git checkout 08a6497b76ad098a5f7eda3e4ec89e8032a4da51 file css  -  this takes the files as they were from the old commit  Then I did my changes  And I committed again   git status  to check which files were modified  git diff  to check the changes you made  git add   git commit -m  my message    I checked my history with git log  and I still have my history along with my new changes made from the old files  And I could push too   Note that to go back to the state you want you need to put the hash of the commit before the unwanted changes  Also make sure you don t have uncommitted changes before you do that

User · Answer

It sounds like you just want to reset to C  that is make the tree      A-B-C   You can do that with reset   git reset --hard HEAD 3    Note  You said three commits ago so that s what I wrote  in your example C is only two commits ago  so you might want to use HEAD 2     You can also use revert if you want  although as far as I know you need to do the reverts one at a time   git revert HEAD       Reverts E git revert HEAD 2     Reverts D   That will create a new commit F that s the same contents as D  and G that s the same contents as C  You can rebase to squash those together if you want

[git] Checkout old commit and make it a new commit

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