Re: fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD^': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 9, 2015, 09:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20150909092042.GC21892@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1441787643787-7639207.post@n2.nabble.com>

On Wed, Sep 09, 2015 at 01:34:03AM -0700, davilda_ wrote:

> i'm new with git and i just want to cancel a commit. I just do git add and
> git commit.
> How can i canceled a commit in my case.

Usually with "git reset HEAD^". But I'm guessing from your subject line that you tried that, and it did not work because this commit is the _only_ commit in your repository (and "HEAD^", which means "the parent commit of HEAD", does not make any sense, as there is no parent).

Annoyingly, I don't think there is an easy way with the current tools to handle this corner case (you want to not reset to a commit, but back to the "unborn branch" state).

The "simplest" way to do that is:

  rm .git/refs/heads/master

but that is not guaranteed to work in future versions of git, and I wouldn't recommend it in general.

Probably a better workflow is to create the commit state you _do_ want (change files, "git add" them, etc), and then run "git commit --amend" to replace the bad commit.

-Peff