Can I do a partial revert in GIT

Question

Is it possible to revert only a single file or certain changes in a file in multi file commit?

Full story I committed a bunch of files. A number of

Answer 1

You can revert the commit without creating a new one by adding the '--no-commit' option. This leaves all the reverted files in the staging area. From there, I'd perform a soft reset and add in the changes I really wanted. For an example workflow:

git revert <sha-of-bad-commit> --no-commit
git reset   // This gets them out of the staging area
<edit bad file to look like it should, if necessary>
git add <bad-file>
git checkout . // This wipes all the undesired reverts still hanging around in the working copy
git commit

Answer 2

You can just manually check out the old, good contents of the files you want to revert using git checkout. For instance, if you want to revert my-important-file to the version it was in the version abc123, you can do

git checkout abc123 -- my-important-file

Now you have the old contents of my-important-file back, and can even edit them if you feel like, and commit as usual to make a commit which will revert the changes that he made. If there are only some parts of his commit that you want to revert, use git add -p to select only a few hunks from the patch that you are committing.

Answer 3

I found a way to do this on the Git mailing list:

git show <commit> -- <path> | git apply --reverse

Source: http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Revert-a-single-commit-in-a-single-file-td6064050.html#a6064406

Variations

That command fails (causing no changes) if the patch does not apply cleanly, but with --3way you instead get conflicts which you can then resolve manually (in this case Casey's answer might be more practical):

git show <commit> -- <path> | git apply --reverse --3way

You can also use this to partially revert multiple commits, e.g.:

git log -S<string> --patch | git apply --reverse

to revert files with changes matching <string> in any commit. This is exactly what I needed in my use case (a few separate commits introduced similar changes to different files, along with changes other files in unrelated ways that I did not want to revert).

If you have diff.noprefix=true set in your ~/.gitconfig then you need to add -p0 to the git apply command, e.g.

git show <commit> -- <path> | git apply -p0 --reverse

Answer 4

You can interactively apply old version of a file using the checkout command.

For example, if you know the COMMIT where the code to add back was removed, you can run the following command:

git checkout -p COMMIT^ -- FILE_TO_REVERT

Git will prompt you to add back the hunks that are missing from the current version of the file. You can use e to create a patch of the change before applying it back.