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

I was using GitX to prepare a commit. Something happened -- I don't know what -- and suddenly my branch only had a single commit in it that appears to contain all the files in my tree. So I went to the command line and did this:

$ git reset --soft HEAD^ fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD^': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

When I do 'git log' in this branch, there's only one commit. Now, I had many commits in this branch a few minutes ago. I really, really, don't want to lose this.

What steps should I take to attempt to recover?

Hi Todd,

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:09:08PM +0000, Todd Wells wrote:

Take a look at 'gitk yourbranch@{1}' or 'git log yourbranch@{1}'. If it looks like your branch's lost history, then you can recover from this situation with 'git reset --hard yourbranch@{1}'.

You can read up about the details here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#recovering-lost-changes

HtH, Gábor

Todd Wells wrote:

Check if you can reset your HEAD to a previous state saved in your (local) reflog.

See section "RefLog Shortnames" in http://progit.org/book/ch6-1.html

-Mathias

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Todd Wells <ttopwells@gmail.com> wrote:

You could try:

git log -g

which will show you the reflog, a log of recent tip commits of HEAD. You could also try to see other local branches and their reflog.

If all this fails you can:

git fsck --unreachable

that will output all the unreachable commits/objects, those not in your branches or reflogs.

Once you have the correct commit you can reset the HEAD to this commit:

git reset HEAD

(or with --hard as necessary).

HTH, Santi

Hi, 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. Best regards

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

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

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Yeah, "git checkout -b" has a stronger sibling "git checkout -B" (i.e. I know that the named branch already exists, so this is not a request to create a new one, but to repoint that existing one), but there is no analogue for "git checkout --orphan". That could be worked around with something like this though:

    $ git checkout --orphan hu
    $ git branch -D master
    $ git checkout --orphan master

As I agree with your "amending is better", I do not think allowing an easier access to such a feature is urgent or important, though.

Please, don't top post, it's difficult to follow a "reversed" conversation.

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Todd Wells <ttopwells@gmail.com> wrote:

HEAD@{0} = HEAD

so for sure it is not what you want.

You should first examine the commit history with "git log" or better with gitk:

gitk HEAD@{1}

or

gitk HEAD@{2}

and when you are sure:

git reset --hard HEAD@{n}

(Note that all local changes in the worktree will be lost).

HTH, Santi