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I'm wondering if there is a way to quickly reverse specific hunk of a commit.

I can generate a diff between two commits or HEAD to see the difference.

How do I reverse just one of those hunks (or better yet, a set of specific hunks)?

smci
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dkinzer
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4 Answers4

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git checkout -p $REF -- path/to/file

e.g.,

git checkout -p HEAD^ myfile

Where $REF is a ref name or commit ID that specifies the commit you want to take the file state from. For example, to selectively revert changes made in the last commit, use HEAD^.

Rob Bednark
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cdhowie
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    More precisely, that will let you selectively check out versions of content from the previous commit; changes between your current commit and the work tree will also be discarded. – Cascabel Nov 22 '10 at 17:32
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    Yes I've done this that before. But this reverts back all the changes? I'm looking to revert back only some of the changes. – dkinzer Nov 22 '10 at 17:32
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    @DKinzer: No, the `-p` option will let you interactively select hunks to apply to your working tree. – cdhowie Nov 22 '10 at 17:33
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    No problem. Note that a lot of git commits (`add`, `checkout`, `reset`, etc.) will take the `-p` option this way and will let you pick which hunks to act on. This is really handy when two hunks in the same file should go into different commits. – cdhowie Nov 22 '10 at 17:36
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    I'm new to git and so far only knew about -i for selectively choosing commits when doing a rebase. I think the -p option will be very useful to me. – dkinzer Nov 22 '10 at 17:38
  • In order to remove hunks, select `y` when prompted for each hunk. This will produce a staged diff on top of your previous commit without modifying it. You can then view the diff by unstaging it (`git reset `) then `git diff`. Finally, you can merge it into your previous commit via `git commit --amend `). – Nick Desaulniers Apr 03 '20 at 21:50
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To revert one or more hunks from specific commit(s) do like this - using add -p in essence:

git revert --no-commit <commit>…​ 
git reset                              # unstage things
git add -p [OPTIONS] [<pathspec>…​]     # choose hunks interactively
git restore .                          # wipe the rest (in root directory)
... maybe further changes ...
git commit [--fixup] ...

Future git versions may support git revert -p directly...

Note: Methods like git checkout/restore -p ... do not consistently revert hunks from a specific commit but go to pick parts from a certain file state - possibly loosing changes in other later commits.

kxr
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git difftool $REF -- /path/to/file

where $REF is a ref name or commit ID that specifies the commit you want to take the file state from. For example, to selectively revert changes made in the last commit, use HEAD^.

This question was already answered by @cdhowie, but I find it somewhat nicer to use an interactive difftool like meld to selectively restore old hunks/lines of code, especially if there is a newly-introduced, hard-to-find bug in the code.

erik
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0

To recover a deleted file from a previous commit I used the answer here:

Find and restore a deleted file in a Git repository

git checkout <deleting_commit>^ -- <file_path>
Community
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John Naegle
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