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In Git, the term rm is git removean alias for the command. So it is used to remove a single file or a bunch of files from the repository. git rmThe main functionality of in Git is to remove tracked files using Git index.

However, git rmit can also be used to remove files from the working directory and the index. It removes files from the current working directory and its subdirectories in the same branch. It does not delete files outside the current working directory. It is worth mentioning that git rmthe command is not used to delete branches in the repository.

Deleting files in Git

To remove a single file from the Git index, we use the following command:

$ git rm <file>

Similarly, to remove a bunch of files from Git, we use the following command.

$ git rm <file> <file> <file> ...

If we wish to remove a file from our working directory, we use the following command:

$ git rm --cached <file>

git rm --cachedWhen you delete a file from your working directory, it does not remove it from the Git index.

But in this post, we explained what to do if we accidentally applied this command and now we want to revert it. The method mentioned below is an easy way to revert the changes. Git has a lot of commands to revert it. I thought it would be better to cover the ones we will use the most in the following sections:

checkoutRestore using Git command rm:

First, we will execute the command git reset to restore the staging area to the changes we made.

git reset

After applying git reset, we'll run git checkoutto restore files or folders that were deleted during the last checkin in the same repository.

git checkout <file-name>

If we don't want to restore the staging area and check the deleted files, we can easily perform it by mentioning head to achieve the desired goal as shown below:

git checkout HEAD <file-name>

Restore using Git resetcommandrm

If we have no important uncommitted changes, then we will --hardrun with the -p option git reset, which will reset everything to our latest commit in the branch:

git reset --hard HEAD

If we have uncommitted changes and the first git command does not work, then we will git stashsave the uncommitted changes using:

git stash
git reset --hard HEAD
git stash pop