Reset File Changes with git

By  on  

There are many different philosophies when it comes to code review but mine is fairly simple:  I like receiving early "work in progress" patches, I like to be positive in my code review messages, and if a patch is 90% there, I like to finish the patch myself so the project and contributor both benefit.

Every once in while, however, a patch comes in with an unrelated file change or code added to the wrong file, in which case I need to reset a file's contents before the change commit.  You can restore a file's contents before a patch with the following:

git reset origin/master path/to/file-to-be-changed.ext

Once this shell snippet is executed, the file's contents are restored and can be re-commited to restore the file contents.

Recent Features

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Image Reflections with CSS

    Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image.  The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves.  Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

Discussion

  1. Wouldn’t

    git checkout path/to/file

    achieve the same?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!