Find deleted files in the commit history of a Git project
This article discusses finding deleted files in the commit history of a project. This is handy when you want to recover a file you deleted in a project.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
Steps to find and restore deleted files in Git
In the scenario where we have deleted a file and cannot remember the file path, we can execute the following command to find the path.
$ git log --all --full-history -- "<OurFile>"
The command above will output all commits in our commit history that contain <OurFile>files whose names match our pattern . Of course, you must <OurFile>replace with the correct name of your file.
The output can help us get the file path using the commit hash as shown below.
$ git show --pretty="" --name-only <sha1-commit-hash>
Now we have the path to the file. However, we want to restore a specific version of the file.
What should we do?
As shown below, we have to get the commit that changed the file.
$ git log --all --full-history -- <path-to-file>
To get the version we want, we would run:
$ git show <sha1-commit-hash> -- <path-to-file>
Restore files to your working copy
As shown in the figure below, we will use the git checkout command to restore our files.
$ git checkout <sha1-commit-hash>^ -- <path-to-file>
We added the caret ^to instruct Git to get the file version from the previous commit. This ensures that we get the previous contents of the file if it was deleted.
In short, the Git version control system is very strict about losing user data. If you have deleted a file in your project and you need to recover it, follow the steps we outlined above.
You don't need to know the full path to the file.
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