How to reset to the top of a branch

Question

Suppose I'm working on master and I've commit 5 changesets:

v1 -- v2 -- v3 -- v4 -- v5

now I do 'git reset --hard v3' to go back to a particular point. At this stage, 'git log' will only show the 1st 3 commits and the hash for v4 and v5 will not be displayed. How can I get back to v5 easily?

(I did find a way to do this by poking into the .git directory but it's tedious and I'd like to avoid dealing with .git directory directly).

possible duplicate of [Undo git reset --hard](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7374069/undo-git-reset-hard) — Piotr Zierhoffer, Mar 24 '14 at 13:03

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 24 '14 at 13:05

2

The git reflog should contain an entry about the former HEAD. You can easily git checkout that state (HEAD@{N}) and work with it.

answered Mar 24 '14 at 13:05

TimWolla

30,523
8
64
89

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 24 '14 at 13:04

For this you can use the git reflog command. git reflog shows you the old positions of HEAD with the corresponding SHA-1 keys and the operation done.

You should be able to easily find the SHA-1 key you are looking for. And the you can just use git branch -f <SHA-1 Key> or git reset --hard <SHA-1 Key> etc..

Here is there documentation, if you want to know more.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: And as TimWolla states, you can also use HEAD@{N} to navigate through the old HEAD references.

How to reset to the top of a branch

2 Answers2