Re: Restore a single file in the index back to HEAD

Andreas Ericsson [off-list ref] writes:

Alex Riesen wrote:

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Which leads us to the always interesting, fun and exciting:

   git ls-tree -r HEAD | git update-index --index-info

which will undo everything except 'git add' from the index, as
ls-tree -r is listing everything in the last commit.

... and also shows The Power of the Pipe, which Daniel@google was
missing in recent versions of git. ;-)

Btw, this is most definitely not a documented thing and requires a bit
of core git knowledge, so perhaps the "shell-scripts were good for
hackers to learn what to pipe where" really *is* a very important point.

Agreed.

Still, it is very impressive, it is supported (and will be
supported, I assume),
and as such - worth mentioning at least in these examples everyone keeps
dreaming about. Until that happened, why not mention that the output
of "git ls-tree" is compatible with --index-info of "update-index"?

+1. Me likes, although I would amend the command-line that Shawn sent
and describe what it does. Examples > descriptions everywhere else in
the git docs, so it would be concise to do so.

I do not like the one that does the whole tree that much.  I
would think "git-read-tree -m HEAD" would be simpler and more
efficient if you are reverting the whole tree.

On the other hand, I designed --index-info to be compatible with
ls-tree output (it is not an accident, it was designed).  In

	git ls-tree HEAD frotz | git update-index --index-info

"frotz" part does not have to be the exact path but can be a
directory name.  It means "revert everything in this directory".

This is quite heavy-handed and you would probably want to run
update-index --refresh afterwards.