Re: Retrieving a file in git that was deleted and committed

From: Bryan Turner <bturner@atlassian.com>
Date: Dec 7, 2018, 06:55 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGyf7-FUHMEq_FfPNrH6uT2b-nCd_wi=Aww+OUuoDem11DROGA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CADHAf1Y_d=-9By4jC2xd+BmWJgfGmBNUr=uSuQtfuHDrarN4kw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 10:49 PM biswaranjan panda <biswaranjan.nitrkl@gmail.com> wrote:

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>
> I have the following scenario:
>
> On a branch A, I deleted a file foo.txt and committed the change. Then
> I did a bunch of other changes.
> Now I want to undelete foo.txt.
>
> One way is to checkout a separate branch B where the file is present.
> Then checkout A. Then do
> git checkout B -- path_to_file

It doesn't change anything, but note that you don't need to checkout B first, to restore the file. If you know a commit SHA where the file is present, "git checkout SHA -- path_to_file" will pull back the file as it existed at that commit.

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>
> While this does gets the file back, the file shows up as a new file to
> be committed. Once I commit it, git blame doesn't show the old history
> for the file.
>
> I would appreciate if anyone knows how to preserve git blame history

It's not possible, as far as I'm aware. While the new file has the same name as the old file, to Git they are two unrelated entries that happen to reside at the same path. Even things like "git log --follow" won't consider the file to be related to its previous history.

Bryan