git undo all uncommitted or unsaved changes

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I’m trying to undo all changes since my last commit. I tried git reset --hard and git reset --hard HEAD after viewing this post. I responds with head is now at 18c3773… but when I look at my local source all the files are still there. What am I missing?

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  • This will unstage all files you might have staged with git add:

    git reset

  • This will revert all local uncommitted changes (should be executed in repo root):

    git checkout .

    You can also revert uncommitted changes only to particular file or directory:

    git checkout [some_dir|file.txt]

    Yet another way to revert all uncommitted changes (longer to type, but works from any subdirectory):

    git reset --hard HEAD

  • This will remove all local untracked files, so only git tracked files remain:

    git clean -fdx

    WARNING: -x will also remove all ignored files, including ones specified by .gitignore! You may want to use -n for preview of files to be deleted.

To sum it up: executing commands below is basically equivalent to fresh git clone from original source (but it does not re-download anything, so is much faster):

git reset
git checkout .
git clean -fdx

Typical usage for this would be in build scripts, when you must make sure that your tree is absolutely clean – does not have any modifications or locally created object files or build artefacts, and you want to make it work very fast and to not re-clone whole repository every single time.

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