How to revert uncommitted changes to files of a certain type in git

Question

I have a bunch of modified files in my git repository and a large number of them are xml files. How do I revert changes (reset modifications) of only the xml files?

Answer 1

You don't need find or sed, you can use wildcards as git understands them (doesn't depend on your shell):

git checkout -- "*.xml"

The quotes will prevent your shell to expand the command to only files in the current directory before its execution.

You can also disable shell glob expansion (with bash) :

set -f
git checkout -- *.xml

This, of course, will irremediably erase your changes!

Answer 2

Thank you all for your replies, but I have found, for me, most accurate solution:

git diff --name-only -- '*.xml' | sed 's, ,\\&,g' | xargs git checkout --

sed is user to escape spaces which troubled xargs and everything is working very fast and accurate.

Answer 3

find . -name '*.xml' -print0 | xargs -0 git checkout HEAD

or something equivalent if your system doesn't have find and xargs. Or just git checkout HEAD **/*.xml in zsh or any other shell with this form of reqursive globbing.