Accidentally recovered deleted files

Question

I just caused a problem that I'm having trouble finding a solution for. I have been working on a year old Ruby On Rails app, which is stored in a Git repository.

I deleted many files, several commits ago, but never did a git rm filename to remove the files from the repository.

Recently I did a git stash save --keep-index, git stash drop to discard some bad code and go back to the last commit. However when I did this, the deleted files which were not removed from the repository have been restored.

Now my project is crashing because of files that exist, which should not. Is there any way I can re-delete the files, or get a list of the deleted files which were restored?

I tried googling this problem, but google helpfully returns results for "git restore accidentally deleted files" which is the opposite of what I am looking for.

Why don't you just `git rm` the files, commit the change, and be done with it? — blalor, Aug 17 '11 at 01:14
I should have done that before. Now I don't know which files need to be deleted them as I deleted them months ago. — Dave Holowiski, Aug 17 '11 at 01:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

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A stash becomes a commit node in the graph, and just because you dropped it doesn't mean it's gone forever. It'll be garbage collected eventually, but as long as you dropped it relatively recently, you should be able to find it and add it back into your "regular" history as either a stash or a commit. Just look around for how to recover dropped stashes or how to find dangling/lost commits. Something like this, this, or this, perhaps.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

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answered Aug 17 '11 at 01:57

Ryan Stewart

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Thanks. I looked over the possibilites and instead I just went through and deleted files until my application stopped crashing. Lesson learned. – Dave Holowiski Aug 21 '11 at 17:28

Accidentally recovered deleted files

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