Is there a way to go through different commits on a file. Say I modified a file 5 times and I want to go back to change 2, after I already committed and pushed to a repository.
In my understanding the only way is to keep many branches, have I got that right? If I'm right I'm gonna have hundreds of branches in a few days, so I'm probably not understanding it really.
Could anyone clear that up please?
Git is very flexible. You shouldn't need hundreds of branches to do what you are asking. If you want to revert the state all the way back to the 2nd change (and it is indeed a change that was already committed and pushed), use git revert. Something like:
git revert a4r9593432
where a4r9593432 is the starting characters of the hash of the commit you want to back out.
If the commit contains changes to many files, but you just want to revert just one of the files, you can use git reset (the 2nd or 3rd form):
git reset a4r9593432 -- path/to/file.txt
# the reverted state is added to the staging area, ready for commit
git diff --cached path/to/file.txt # view the changes
git commit
git checkout HEAD path/to/file.txt # make the working tree match HEAD
But this is pretty complex, and git reset is dangerous. Use git checkout <hash> <file path> instead, as Jefromi suggests.
If you just want to view what the file looked like in commit x, you can use git show:
git show a4r9593432:path/to/file.txt
For all of the commands, there are many ways to refer to a commit other than via the commit hash (see Naming Commits in the Git User Manual).
Extracted from here: http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Revert-a-single-commit-in-a-single-file-td6064050.html
git revert <commit>
git reset
git add <path>
git commit ...
git reset --hard # making sure you didn't have uncommited changes earlier
It worked very fine to me.
Git doesn't think in terms of file versions. A version in git is a snapshot of the entire tree.
Given this, what you really want is a tree that has the latest content of most files, but with the contents of one file the same as it was 5 commits ago. This will take the form of a new commit on top of the old ones, and the latest version of the tree will have what you want.
I don't know if there's a one-liner that will revert a single file to the contents of 5 commits ago, but the lo-fi solution should work: checkout master~5, copy the file somewhere else, checkout master, copy the file back, then commit.
You can take a diff that undoes the changes you want and commit that.
E.g. If you want to undo the changes in the range from..to, do the following
git diff to..from > foo.diff # get a reverse diff
patch < foo.diff
git commit -a -m "Undid changes from..to".
Source: Stackoverflow.com