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
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools, Mario, and Portal

    I'm a big fan of video games. I don't get much time to play them but I'll put down the MacBook Pro long enough to get a few games in. One of my favorites is Portal. For those who don't know, what's...

  • By
    Fancy FAQs with jQuery Sliders

    Frequently asked questions can be super boring, right? They don't have to be! I've already shown you how to create fancy FAQs with MooTools -- here's how to create the same effect using jQuery. The HTML Simply a series of H3s and DIVs wrapper...

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!