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While working on an important project at work, I finally got a huge problem solved and was in a good place to commit my changes. I had 6 files that I had changed at various times over 10 days while trying to get over this hurdle. Not every change was directly related to the problem, so I started to add the files and commit them in groups so they would be easier to track.

git add firstfile.c
git commit -a -m "my comment that is only supposed to be for this one file."

Thats right, I foolishly fat-fingered the -a in the commit line, committing all of the changes for all 6 files under the wrong commit message. Now this is not the end of the world. I had not pushed this commit to github so no harm no foul. I could just roll back head and try again.

git reset --hard HEAD^

Oh crap! Almost as soon as I hit the enter key I realized that I had once again screwed up! What can I say - it was getting late and I was getting punchy. Either way I had just lost days worth of modifications including the solution to the problem that plagued my project for so long. Had I just left off that --hard it would have been okay! However git has my back! Git never really deletes or forgets a commit.

git reflog

This will show a list of all commits along with their sha signatures and comments. We can restore to a lost commit by checking it out to its own branch. Assuming that our lost commit has the signature ab12345 we can use the command:

git checkout -b branch_with_fix ab12345

Now I had a branch with all of those changes restored. I quickly pushed this branch to github so I would not lose them again. Then I copied those 6 files to temporary location, checked out master and copied the files back. I was now in the same place as before the botched commit! This time around I took my time and committed the files properly.