Restore a deleted folder in a Git repo

Question

I have deleted all the contents inside a folder and the folder is empty. I still had a copy in my remote repo. But when I did a git pull it didn\'t put back the

Answer 1

The only thing that worked for me was to checkout the repo in another folder. Assume the current repo is in /home/me/current.

I then did

git clone /home/me/current /home/me/temp

This make a separate clone of the repo in /home/me/temp

I can now go to /home/me/temp and do whatever I want. For example

git reset --hard commit-hash-before-delete

Now I can copy the deleted file folder back

cp -r /home/me/temp/some/deleted/folder /home/me/current/some/deleted/folder

And delete the temp folder

rm -rf /home/me/temp

The examples of

git checkout -- some/deleted/folder
git checkout -- some/deleted/folder/*

DO NOT WORK

$ git checkout -- some/deleted/folder/*
zsh: no matches found: some/deleted/folder/*
$ git checkout -- some/deleted/folder
error: pathspec 'some/deleted/folder' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Other examples like

git reset --hard HEAD

are destructive beyond just the deleted files. Any other changes will also be lost.

Similarly

git reset --hard some-commit

will lose any commits after some-commit

Answer 2

for uncommited deletions, Its as simple as this :

git reset HEAD rel/path/to/deleted/directory/*