git rebase ate my commits ! Translate 'git reflog' output for me?

Question

I had done five commits and I wanted to make them all into one commit before pushing them. For some reason I decided to try doing this by a different means than I usually use.

FWIW: I was attempting to follow the instructions here http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html .

I'll put a lot of detail below but you might want to skip down to the bottom of the question where I put the output of git reflog because I suspect that's what's significant here.

So here's what I did - with all my changes committed I did :

git rebase -i HEAD~5

and I was presented with the text editor which showed the commits and I, wrongly I now realise, changed all the first column values of 'pick' to 'squash'.

I then saw an error message. To my shame I can't remember what the error message said but I think it said something like "You have no commit to use".

At that point I was back to the prompt and when I try to repeat the :

git rebase -i HEAD~5

I get the message :

It seems that there is already a rebase-merge directory, and
I wonder if you are in the middle of another rebase.  If that is the
case, please try
        git rebase (--continue | --abort | --skip)
If that is not the case, please
        rm -fr /home/foo/dev/bar/.git/rebase-merge
and run me again.  I am stopping in case you still have something
valuable there.

Then I read this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/12163247/364088 which suggests doing :

git reset --soft HEAD^

I did that (I wish I had not). After I'd done it.

git status

showed a number of files with uncommitted changes although

git diff

showed no changes . Anyway I then did a

git commit

And now I have lost all my chnages in the last five commits !

git reflog

shows (this is just the top of it):

3f80e4b HEAD@{0}: commit: Decorator demo added
1888dd9 HEAD@{1}: reset: moving to HEAD^
7d6228e HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from master to 7d6228eb9b03d0c45acf7c66e662220213cf4fb9
705736f HEAD@{3}: commit: Snapshot commit - squash later
75db0c3 HEAD@{4}: commit: Snapshot commit - squash later
b70b50f HEAD@{5}: commit: Snapshot commit - squash later
d970a62 HEAD@{6}: commit: Snapshot commit - squash later
0f24e88 HEAD@{7}: commit: Snapshot commit - squash later
7d6228e HEAD@{8}: commit: Move some standard code into its own module and tidy up .
1888dd9 HEAD@{9}: commit: Early version of the decorators demo

So the thing is the commits labelled "Snapshot commit - squash later" are the ones I wanted to merge into a single commit.

The commits HEAD@{2} and HEAD@{1} are stuff I've done in the process of trying to merge those "Snapshot commit - squash later". The commit HEAD@{0} is the commit I did after the rebase and the reset.

In case it matters the last commit pushed was HEAD@{8}.

So what I'd like is to get back to the '705736f' commit and then, ideally do the merging of commits again only this time make it work !

I'd be quite happy if I could recover the work in the "Snapshot commit - squash later" changes.

Would be grateful for advice.

Answer 1

My preferred method is to stick a label on the thing you want to get back, like a branch:

git branch recover 705736f

At this point you can check it out (it's a new local branch) and make sure you've recovered what you wanted:

git checkout recover
git log    # or gitk, or whatever

This is a new branch label, pointing at the old (pre-rebase-attempt) commits.

Your new commit (Decorator demo added) will be on the other branch, which (in a graph log viewer, like gitk --branches or git log with --graph) forks off after the Early version of the decorators demo commit.

---

If you're willing to "lose" (except for in the reflog) the new commit, you can force-reset your current branch back to the old commit in the reflog:

git reset --hard 705736f

(instead of creating a new branch to point to 705736f). Again, run git log to see if that's where you want (you can even git log 705736f first!).

Answer 2

Just do:

$ git reset --hard HEAD@{3}

and you'll get back to the point where you did your last commit. From then you can act accordingly.