git undo all uncommitted or unsaved changes

  • 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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