Re: Recovering Committed Changes in a Detached Head?

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Oct 8, 2011, 21:37 UTC
Message-ID: <20111008213741.GA24409@goldbirke>
In-Reply-To: <1318107488.5865.46.camel@R0b0ty>

Hi,

On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 04:58:07PM -0400, Daly Gutierrez wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

> Is this possible after changing from the Detached Head branch to an
> existing branch?  How about if I don't remember the commit SHA1 ID?
> 
> What I did, to the best of my knowledge:
> 1) Checked out a previous version:
> > git checkout 3a5bb38a83c00f7acab573f0ec836577143200aa
> 
> 2) Modified file and committed the changes in the detached branch.
> > git log
>  commit 92aa5381b9f7229523dba42aa94735c30f173451
>  Author: Daly Gutierrez <Daly.Gutierrez@gmail.com>
>  Date:   Sat Oct 8 16:20:11 2011 -0400
> 
>     Committing this in the Detached Head
> 
> 3) For curiosity,
> > git branch
> * (no branch)
>   New_Branch
>   Second_New_Branch
>   master
> 
> 4) Changed to 'New_Branch' branch...  I no longer see the detached
> branch...
>  > git branch
> * New_Branch
>   Second_New_Branch
>   master
> 
> 5) Want to access the file with the changes I made in the Detached
> branch, but don't know how...  PLEASE HELP?

git reflog to the rescue. For your example above it will output something like this:

  deadbeef HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from 92aa5381b9f7229523dba42aa94735c30f173451 to New_Branch
  92aa5381 HEAD@{1}: commit: Committing this in the Detached Head
  3a5bb38a HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from master to 3a5bb38a83c00f7acab573f0ec836577143200aa
  deafbabe HEAD@{3}: ...
  ...

There you see the first line of the commit message from your "lost" commit, and you can do

  git checkout -b lost_detached_head 92aa5381

and you get a branch pointing to that commit you made while on detached head, and you can work with it as usual.

Best, Gábor