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

In the case that you want to revert a file to a previous commit (and the file you want to revert already committed) you can use

git checkout HEAD^1 path/to/file

or

git checkout HEAD~1 path/to/file

Then just stage and commit the "new" version.

Armed with the knowledge that a commit can have two parents in the case of a merge, you should know that HEAD^1 is the first parent and HEAD~1 is the second parent.

Either will work if there is only one parent in the tree.