How to find and restore a deleted file in a Git repository

Question

Say I\'m in a Git repository. I delete a file and commit that change. I continue working and make some more commits. Then, I find I need to restore that file.

I know

Answer 1

Find the last commit that affected the given path. As the file isn't in the HEAD commit, this commit must have deleted it.

git rev-list -n 1 HEAD -- <file_path>

Then checkout the version at the commit before, using the caret (^) symbol:

git checkout <deleting_commit>^ -- <file_path>

Or in one command, if $file is the file in question.

git checkout $(git rev-list -n 1 HEAD -- "$file")^ -- "$file"

---

If you are using zsh and have the EXTENDED_GLOB option enabled, the caret symbol won't work. You can use ~1 instead.

git checkout $(git rev-list -n 1 HEAD -- "$file")~1 -- "$file"

Answer 2

I came to this question looking to restore a file I just deleted but I hadn't yet committed the change. Just in case you find yourself in this situation, all you need to do is the following:

git checkout HEAD -- path/to/file.ext

Answer 3

I had to restore a bunch of deleted files from a specific commit, and I managed it with two commands:

git show <rev> --diff-filter=D --summary --name-only --no-commit-id | xargs git checkout <rev>^ -- 
git show <rev> --diff-filter=D --summary --name-only --no-commit-id | xargs git reset HEAD 

(Note the trailing space on the end of each command.)

The files had been added to the .gitignore file and then cleared with git rm. I needed to restore the files, but then unstage them. I had hundreds of files to restore, and typing things manually for each file as in the other examples was going to be far too slow.

Answer 4

I had the same question. Without knowing it, I had created a dangling commit.

List dangling commits

git fsck --lost-found

Inspect each dangling commit

git reset --hard <commit id>

My files reappeared when I moved to the dangling commit.

git status for the reason:

“HEAD detached from <commit id where it detached>”

Answer 5

Simple and precise-

First of all, get a latest stable commit in which you have that file by -

git log 

Say you find $commitid 1234567..., then

git checkout <$commitid> $fileName

This will restore the file version which was in that commit.

Answer 6

If the deletion has not been committed, the command below will restore the deleted file in the working tree.

$ git checkout -- <file>

You can get a list of all the deleted files in the working tree using the command below.

$ git ls-files --deleted

If the deletion has been committed, find the commit where it happened, then recover the file from this commit.

$ git rev-list -n 1 HEAD -- <file>
$ git checkout <commit>^ -- <file>

In case you are looking for the path of the file to recover, the following command will display a summary of all deleted files.

$ git log --diff-filter=D --summary