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Just faced an issue where someone overwritten my whole commit and there are lot of other commits on top of this, now I have to re-commit that particular commit. Any help would be appreciated.

Someone got merge conflict and while merging he lost my all changes. I don't know what he did, but my changes are not there. IN history my commit is there but If I am seeing above his merge my changes are reverted.

Now I cannot revert his merge commit because it contains lots of files as compare to me also I don't want to change each file one by one manually. Is there any way to get back my changes without effecting other's.

Felipe
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Sombir Kumar
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  • Was this person using TortoiseGit? I've seen this kind of thing happen with TortoiseGit. It gives you the option to uncheck things you don't want in the merge, and some people cluelessly uncheck all the files they don't recognize as having changed (because the other side of the merge changed them). – Ryan Lundy Sep 21 '18 at 07:56

4 Answers4

56

You can do that typing the following commands:

$ git reflog

then select the ID of the commit that you want to retrieve.

Then type the following command:

$ git cherry-pick <'ID'>

Instead of <'ID'> enter the ID from the above reflog.

Then you will have the changes of that commit.

Now check if anything is still remaining by:

$ git status

If anything is in unstaged commit, then add it by the following commands and commit:

$ git add -A //Any other option or the name of the file with the path that you want to commit
$ git commit -m "Your message here for that commit"
$ git push

I hope this answer is what you are expecting for.

hjpotter92
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Code_Ninja
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33

The easiest way to fix this is usually, as Code_Ninja suggested, to use git cherry-pick to re-commit your changes. Usually, the method recommended by Venkataraman R won't work because Git will tell you that there is nothing to merge. (If it does work, it's OK too.) The exact details depend on the situation. For posterity, though, let's look at the most common way that this happens.

Someone got merge conflict and while merging he lost my all changes.

This is very easy for the "someone" to do. Let's give "someone" a name; let's call him Carl the Careless. Carl runs:

git merge carls-feature

or perhaps even:

git pull

(though I recommend that any beginner, like Carl here, avoid git pull—it's better that he run git merge directly, so that he can get an idea about what he's doing).

In any case, Carl now sees this:

Auto-merging somefile.ext
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in somefile.ext

Poor Carl panics, searches the web (perhaps even StackOverflow) for advice, and rather than looking at, say, How to resolve merge conflicts in Git,1 Carl just runs:

git checkout --ours somefile.ext
git add somefile.ext
git commit

Carl has just wiped out your work!

Remember, the goal of a merge is to combine work. Git will try to do this on its own, but sometimes Git is not able to complete the process by itself. In these cases, Git stops and gets help from its human operator.

This human operator—you, if you're the one with the merge conflict!—is in full, complete, 100% control of the merge result. Git will believe you, even if you tell it that the correct result is to ignore the other guy's work entirely and just take your version.

(Note that even if Git thinks it has correctly merged two people's different changes, Git does not always get it right. It's still your responsibility to check that Git got it right. It's a good idea to have some sort of thorough test system you can use. Git is just following simple text-combining rules, that happen to work really well for many cases.)

1The accepted answer here recommends using git mergetool with vimdiff as the tool. I happen to dislike git mergetool, and I recommend reading through the other answers too, and experimenting to see what works best for you. But if git mergetool works well for you, that's fine. Note that git mergetool can use other merge tools than vimdiff; if you have a merge tool you prefer, git mergetool is likely to be able to run it. The Pro Git book has additional advice, including a chapter on advanced merging.

torek
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    Thanks for so much information, by creating branch worked for me, but I am agree with you that I should follow cherry picking method in this type of case. Hence changing my accepted answer. – Sombir Kumar Sep 05 '18 at 05:53
  • To elaborate on why merging in a branch of the commit shouldn't work, it's because typically the commit is already in the history (in whatever shared branch you're using). You can't merge in a commit that is already there. The cherry-picking approach would work instead because it creates an entirely new commit (which is simply duplicating the changes). Git has to be used to not merging in commits that are already there because branches are really just a pointer to some commit (which in turn points to its parents, going allll the way back). So branches are supposed to share many commits! – Kat Sep 10 '18 at 18:44
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You can create a branch out of your old commit and then follow the git process to merge changes from master to your branch and handle merge conflict.

Below steps for create a branch out of your old commit and checkout the same.

git branch branchname <sha1 of your old commit>
git checkout branchname

or 

git checkout -b branchname <sha1 of your old commit>
Venkataraman R
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  • thanks @Venkataraman, But we don't have permissions for creating branch. Are you talking about local branch? – Sombir Kumar Sep 05 '18 at 04:36
  • @CuriousGeek, Yes. I am talking about local branch. You can later set-upstream for this local branch. – Venkataraman R Sep 05 '18 at 04:41
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    As an aside, `git branch` (and similar like `git checkout -b `) is *always* a local branch. Almost every kind of change you'd typically make in git is local until you push it to a remote repo. You can always choose to keep things locally only or to only push certain branches. – Kat Sep 10 '18 at 18:41
  • This is the first thing I did, Unfortunately it did not work because the commit Id was the same, and git just told there is nothing to merge – Adithya Santhosh May 19 '22 at 04:48
0

Firstly checkout which branch are you at 

git log --all

To avoid merge conflicts i suggest you to create a branch

   git branch <new branch name>

and copy the commit id for ex..

git branch -f <new branch name> <commit ID>

or

git checkout -b <new branchname> <sha1 of your old commit>

then merge with master, be sure to checkout to the new brach

git merge master

If there is any a problem with push, and remote branch is master, then do:

git fetch origin

to fetch most recent changes

git rebase origin/master

to put your changes on top, and finally

git push origin master

ajmalbinnizam
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