How can I reset or revert a file to a specific revision?

Question

I have made some changes to a file which has been committed a few times as part of a group of files, but now want to reset/revert the changes on it back to a previous versio

Answer 1

You can quickly review the changes made to a file using the diff command:

git diff  

Then to revert a specific file to that commit use the reset command:

git reset  

You may need to use the --hard option if you have local modifications.

A good workflow for managaging waypoints is to use tags to cleanly mark points in your timeline. I can't quite understand your last sentence but what you may want is diverge a branch from a previous point in time. To do this, use the handy checkout command:

git checkout 
git checkout -b 

You can then rebase that against your mainline when you are ready to merge those changes:

git checkout 
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge