Remove commits from an accidental merge

Question

I have a situation, where I accidentally merged a submodule in the super project. I ran the below command from the super project i.e the location of .gitmodules

git pull submodule_dir/submodule_file

Ofcourse, now every commit messages from the submodule is integrated in the super project. I can manually remove the files, because they are just in a folder, but how do I remove all the commits ( they are around 9 in total ) and can also be identified. The problem is that rebase would not work, because the commits are spread across. A rebase for example to HEAD^9 would also remove some of the commits that actually belongs to the superproject.

git reset, git rebase wont work. because otherwise, I will loose other commits.

git reset --hard origin/master is the closest best bet, but it would destroy my local changes that I already commited.

What could be the solution? I have never used cherry pick,, but I am not sure, if I should do it. I wanted to ask before experimenting and make things worse. Something like this and to remove all the culprit commits.

commit latest: this consists of all my local changes and they are precious.
commit 
commit
culprit commit
commit
commit 
culprit commit
commit
commit
culprit commit
commit
commit
commit
commit

Possible duplicate of [How do I remove a submodule?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1260748/how-do-i-remove-a-submodule) — Tim Biegeleisen, Sep 08 '17 at 07:09
@TimBiegeleisen I think you have misread the problem. nothing to do with submodules — infoclogged, Sep 08 '17 at 07:13
You can't rebase out a merge commit but it is possible to rebase to a prior commit in one parent of a merge commit. — Tim Biegeleisen, Sep 08 '17 at 07:14
you can `git reset --hard ` on your commit before your merge ? — EMottet, Sep 08 '17 at 07:16

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 08 '17 at 07:48

git reset --soft HEAD~9 will preserve your changes but will remove the commits

Does not touch the index file or the working tree at all (but resets the head to , just like all modes do). This leaves all your changed files "Changes to be committed", as git status would put it.

Source

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 08 '17 at 07:16

0

You can use below command from your super branch.

    git reset --hard HEAD~9

It will reset last 9 commits and run below command

    git log

You can see your commits are removed.

answered Sep 08 '17 at 07:16

aji ajith

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Remove commits from an accidental merge

2 Answers2