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

Many suggestions here, most along the lines of git checkout $revision -- $file. A couple of obscure alternatives:

git show $revision:$file > $file

And also, I use this a lot just to see a particular version temporarily:

git show $revision:$file

or

git show $revision:$file | vim -R -

(OBS: $file needs to be prefixed with ./ if it is a relative path for git show $revision:$file to work)

And the even more weird:

git archive $revision $file | tar -x0 > $file