Re: Lost a week?

Daniel Grace <negativeview@gmail.com> writes:

I guess you've been on a detached HEAD for some time. Recent version of Git warn you this way when you enter in this state:

,----
| Note: checking out 'HEAD^'.
| 
| You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
| changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
| state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.
| 
| If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
| do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:
| 
|   git checkout -b new_branch_name
| 
| HEAD is now at a8e7ba9... foo
`----

Now, your changes are probably not lost forever: they're not reachable from a branch, but still there (but don't play with "git gc" until you're sure you've recovered all of it...). "git reflog" should give you the sha1 of the commit you're looking for (if you didn't really mess up everything, you really look for just one commit, which is the tip of the sequence of commits you did while on a detached HEAD, that is, the one just before you did "git checkout master".

Then, do

git branch tmp <the-sha1-you-found> (possibly run "gitk --all" to understand, here) git merge tmp

to create a branch named tmp containing your commits, and merge it into your current branch. Naming the branch isn't strictly necessary, but will help in case you do anything wrong trying to merge.