Book Image

Git for Programmers

By : Jesse Liberty
Book Image

Git for Programmers

By: Jesse Liberty

Overview of this book

Whether you’re looking for a book to deepen your understanding of Git or a refresher, this book is the ultimate guide to Git. Git for Programmers comprehensively equips you with actionable insights on advanced Git concepts in an engaging and straightforward way. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll gain expertise (and confidence) on Git with lots of practical use cases. After a quick refresher on git history and installation, you’ll dive straight into the creation and cloning of your repository. You’ll explore Git places, branching, and GUIs to get familiar with the fundamentals. Then you’ll learn how to handle merge conflicts, rebase, amend, interactive rebase, and use the log, as well as explore important Git commands for managing your repository. The troubleshooting part of this Git book will include detailed instructions on how to bisect, blame, and several other problem handling techniques that will complete your newly acquired Git arsenal. By the end of this book, you’ll be using Git with confidence. Saving, sharing, managing files as well as undoing mistakes and basically rewriting history will be a breeze.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
11
Finding a Broken Commit: Bisect and Blame
13
Next Steps
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

You trashed a file in a previous commit

You ruin a file but you only find out about it after a number of other commits. Ouch. Use git log to find the ObjectID for a commit from before the problem commit. Now we want to get only that file from the commit. For this, we enter:

git checkout ObjectID --<path to file> 

(The path to the file is relative to the root of the project.)

You now have the earlier version in the staging area. You can "unstage" it and edit it from the work area.

An alternative to using the ObjectID is to count back from HEAD, such as:

git checkout HEAD~4 --<path to file>

This just says "go back 4 commits and get the file from there." The two approaches work equally well.