How can I revert a single file to a previous version

Question

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

User · Answer

Extracted from here  http   git 661346 n2 nabble com Revert-a-single-commit-in-a-single-file-td6064050 html   git revert  lt commit gt    git reset   git add  lt path gt    git commit       git reset --hard   making sure you didn t have uncommited changes earlier    It worked very fine to me

User · Answer

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  gt  foo diff    get a reverse diff patch  lt  foo diff git commit -a -m  Undid changes from  to

User · Answer

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  lt hash gt   lt file path gt  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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Let s start with a qualitative description of what we want to do  much of this is said in Ben Straub s answer   We ve made some number of commits  five of which changed a given file  and we want to revert the file to one of the previous versions  First of all  git doesn t keep version numbers for individual files  It just tracks content - a commit is essentially a snapshot of the work tree  along with some metadata  e g  commit message   So  we have to know which commit has the version of the file we want  Once we know that  we ll need to make a new commit reverting the file to that state   We can t just muck around with history  because we ve already pushed this content  and editing history messes with everyone else    So let s start with finding the right commit  You can see the commits which have made modifications to given file s  very easily   git log path to file   If your commit messages aren t good enough  and you need to see what was done to the file in each commit  use the -p --patch option   git log -p path to file   Or  if you prefer the graphical view of gitk  gitk path to file   You can also do this once you ve started gitk through the view menu  one of the options for a view is a list of paths to include   Either way  you ll be able to find the SHA1  hash  of the commit with the version of the file you want  Now  all you have to do is this     get the version of the file from the given commit git checkout  lt commit gt  path to file   and commit this modification git commit    The checkout command first reads the file into the index  then copies it into the work tree  so there s no need to use git add to add it to the index in preparation for committing    If your file may not have a simple history  e g  renames and copies   see VonC s excellent comment  git can be directed to search more carefully for such things  at the expense of speed  If you re confident the history s simple  you needn t bother

[git] How can I revert a single file to a previous version?

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