After the last commit, I modified a bunch of files in my working copy, but I want to undo the changes to one of those files, as in reset it to the same state as the most recent commit.
However, I only want to undo the working copy changes of just that one file alone, nothing else with it.
How do I do that?
You can use
git checkout -- file
You can do it without the -- (as suggested by nimrodm), but if the filename looks like a branch or tag (or other revision identifier), it may get confused, so using -- is best.
You can also check out a particular version of a file:
git checkout v1.2.3 -- file # tag v1.2.3
git checkout stable -- file # stable branch
git checkout origin/master -- file # upstream master
git checkout HEAD -- file # the version from the most recent commit
git checkout HEAD^ -- file # the version before the most recent commit
Just use
git checkout filename
This will replace filename with the latest version from the current branch.
WARNING: your changes will be discarded — no backup is kept.
git checkout <commit> <filename>
I used this today because I realized that my favicon had been overwritten a few commits ago when I upgrated to drupal 6.10, so I had to get it back. Here is what I did:
git checkout 088ecd favicon.ico
If you want to just undo the previous commit's changes to that one file, you can try this:
git checkout branchname^ filename
This will checkout the file as it was before the last commit. If you want to go a few more commits back, use the branchname~n notation.
Git 2.23 introduced a restore to do just that, in an attempt, I think, to make the answer to these kind of questions straightforward.
git restore [--] <pathspec>...
As always, the -- could be needed but when a file name starts with a dash. (The confusion with a branch name is not possible here, as restore's perimeter does not include branches, unlike the do-all checkout)
To be complete, restore can also restore staged files with --staged, and restore from a different commit than HEAD with --source=<tree>.
git restore file
See this duplicate answer (be sure to scroll down to the 2020 update): https://stackoverflow.com/a/31281748/12763497
git checkout a3156ae4913a0226caa62d8627e0e9589b33d04c -p */SearchMaster.jsp
Breakdown: a3156ae4913a0226caa62d8627e0e9589b33d04c = This is the hash value of the commit. It's on my own personal branch (not master).
The -p flag is the path.
*/SearchMaster.jsp is the filename.