I saw an answer to a question here that helps restore a deleted file in git.
The solution was
git checkout <deleting_commit>^ -- <deleted_file_path>
What does the caret character (^) do? I’ve seen it elsewhere doing very useful things in git. It’s magical. Someone please spoil it for me and tell me what it does?
HEAD^ means the first parent of the tip of the current branch.
Remember that git commits can have more than one parent. HEAD^ is short for HEAD^1, and you can also address HEAD^2 and so on as appropriate.
You can get to parents of any commit, not just HEAD. You can also move back through generations: for example, master~2 means the grandparent of the tip of the master branch, favoring the first parent in cases of ambiguity. These specifiers can be chained arbitrarily
, e.g., topic~3^2. See related answer to What’s the difference between HEAD^ and HEAD~ in Git?
For the full details, see the “Specifying Revisions” section of git rev-parse --help.
It means "parent of". So HEAD^ means "the parent of the current HEAD". You can even chain them together: HEAD^^ means "the parent of the parent of the current HEAD" (i.e., the grandparent of the current HEAD), HEAD^^^ means "the parent of the parent of the parent of the current HEAD", and so forth.
The caret refers to the parent of a particular commit. E.g. HEAD^ refers to the parent of the current HEAD commmit. (also, HEAD^^ refers to the grandparent).
The carat represents a commit offset (parent). So for instance, HEAD^ means "one commit from HEAD" and HEAD^^^ means "three commits from HEAD".
OP: What does the caret (^) character mean in Git?
The difference between HEAD^ (Caret) and HEAD~ (Tilde) is how they traverse history backwards from a specified starting point, in this particular case HEAD.
<rev>~[<n>] = select <n>th generation ancestor, following only first* parents
<rev>^[<n>] = select <n>th parent of first generation ancestors
*First parent is always the left hand side of the merge, e.g. the commit on the branch that got merged into.
As seen in the illustration below the two selectors ~ and ^ can be used in combination. Also note that instead of using HEAD as a starting point, any regular reference can be used such as a branch, tag or even a commit hash.
Further more, depending on what ancestor is intended to be selected ^ and ~ can be used interchangeably as seen below in the table.
Source: A thorough rundown can be found in this blog post on the subject.