Git – How to Undo the Last Git Add

To unstage a specific file

git reset <file>

That will remove the file from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

To unstage all files from the current change set:

git reset

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Short answer is : you can't, git only offers ways to return to previous commits (e.g : stuff you commiittted using git commit)

For future use : you can run git add . && git commit -m WIP to "save current modifications"

Longer answer is : if getting back the previous version of this file is more important than keeping your mental health, you may dig in the list of dangling blobs

• What is a dangling blob ?

• some way to hackily check "what blobs were modified recently ?" see some indications in this answer

Heh, I knew I had some kind of script somewhere :

the following script will list the unreachable blobs, which have not yet been packed in an object pack (this is generally the case with recent blobs), and sorts them by creation date (actually : uses the creation date of the file on disk as an estimation of when the blob was created)

#!/bin/sh

git fsck --no-reflogs --unreachable |\
    grep blob |\
    cut -d' ' -f3 |\
    sed -e 's|^\(..\)\(.*\)|.git/objects/\1/\2|' |\
    xargs ls -l -t 2> /dev/null

Some explanations :

# git fsck --unreachable  ,  if you also use "--no-reflogs" this will search
# through commits which could be reached by the reflog but not by live branches
git fsck --no-reflogs --unreachable |\

# only keep lines mentioning "blob" (files)
    grep blob |\

# keep the 3rd field of the output (hash of blob)
    cut -d' ' -f3 |\

# turn hashes into filenames, e.g :
#   aee01f414061ea9b0bdbbc1f66cec0c357f648fe ->
#   .git/objects/ae/e01f414061ea9b0bdbbc1f66cec0c357f648fe
# (this will be the path of this single blob)
    sed -e 's|^\(..\)\(.*\)|.git/objects/\1/\2|' |\

# give this to ls -lt (list by modification time),
# discard messages saying "file does not exist"
    xargs ls -l -t 2> /dev/null