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Sometimes we realize that we need to manually find out which files are important for the current commit and remove the unneeded files from the working directory. The manual process can be difficult, especially when we are building a large project with many developers in a team.

Suppose we have committed a wrong file in our repository and want to remove it from our branch. git resetThe command is a useful tool when dealing with Git. This command is used to remove a specific file from the working directory in a specific Git commit or branch. For example, if you want to HEADremove a file from the commit pointed to by "README.md", you can run the following command.

git reset -soft HEAD@{1}

We can remove the files from a specific commit while keeping the changes in the working directory by running the following command.

git reset HEAD@{1}

As we know, the command used to remove files from a commit is git reset. This command can be used with the -pand -uoptions. -pThe option allows us to keep the changes in the working directory but reset the index. The option -uresets both the index and the working directory.

Let's practice removing a file from a commit with the following example. Suppose we have created a new commit and added a file1file called . Now, we want to remove this file from the commit. We can start this operation using the following command.

git reset -p HEAD~1

This command instructs Git to reset the index and working directory back to the commit HEAD~1. Before we created the commit, we file2added to the working directory. Now, we want to remove this file from the working directory but keep it in the index. We can start it with the following command:

git reset -u HEAD~1

This command instructs Git to reset the index and working directory to the commit HEAD~1. Now, suppose we have added three files to the index, and we want to remove file3all but one from the index. We can start with the following command:

git reset -- '-p -- file3'

This command instructs Git to keep file3and remove other files from the index within the same branch. The command git resetcan be used to remove files from any commit. The command can be -pused with the -p option to keep the changes in the index and working directory and remove files from the commit.

The command can also be -uused with the -reset option to reset the index and working directory but keep the files in the commit.

If we want to remove files from a specific commit, we can use the command with -hardthe -p option git resetand HEADspecify the commit after -p. For example, if we want to remove files from commit test "README.md", we can run the following command.

git reset -hard test

Keep in mind that the command git reset --harddiscards any changes you made to your working directory. If you edited some files and deleted others, the last command will remove any changes you made to the files that are still in your staging area.

However, let's say we don't want that file anymore and want to remove it from the staging area and make it an untracked file. In that case, we would use the --cached-whash command with the -dwhash option git rm. If we also wanted to remove it from the working directory, we would skip --cachedthe -whash option in the command.

$ git rm --cached <file-name>

Here we are almost done with the file recovery process. The irrelevant files have been removed from the staging area and all other changes have been staged. Now, we have to git commitcommit these changes to the branch using the command . We have now reverted our commit, but this does not include the unwanted files.

$ git commit -m "commit message"