Safety Net — For screw-ups
git reflog
Published in
2 min readAug 24, 2013
How many times have you screwed up a commit or a merge and wished you didn’t do it? If you use git or any VCS for that matter, that number would definitely be > 0. I really love the simplicity of git (I’m serious — that’s a post for another day). One of the most amazing features of git which could only be possible by its simplicity is
git reflogGit maintains a list of checkpoints which can accessed using reflog. You can use reflog to undo merges, recover lost commits or branches and a lot more.
NAME
git-reflog — Manage reflog informationSYNOPSIS
git reflog <subcommand> <options>
DESCRIPTION
The command takes various subcommands, and different options depending on the subcommand: git reflog expire [—dry-run] [—stale-fix] [—verbose]
[—expire=<time>] [—expire-unreachable=<time>] [—all] <refs>…
git reflog delete ref@{specifier}…
git reflog [show] [log-options] [<ref>]
Reflog is a mechanism to record when the tip of branches are updated. This command is to manage the information recorded in it. The subcommand “expire” is used to prune older reflog entries. Entries older than expire time, or entries older than expire-unreachable time and not
reachable from the current tip, are removed from the reflog. This is typically not used directly by the end users — instead, see git-gc(1). The subcommand “show” (which is also the default, in the absence of any subcommands) will take all the normal log options, and show the log of the
reference provided in the command-line (or HEAD, by default). The reflog will cover all recent actions (HEAD reflog records branch switching as well). It
is an alias for git log -g —abbrev-commit —pretty=oneline; see git-log(1). The reflog is useful in various Git commands, to specify the old value of a reference. For example, HEAD@{2} means “where HEAD used to be two moves ago”,
master@{one.week.ago} means “where master used to point to one week ago”, and so on. See gitrevisions(7) for more details. To delete single entries from the reflog, use the subcommand “delete” and specify the exact entry (e.g. “git reflog delete master@{2}”).
