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Restore files and dirs from previous commits in Git

When I met git, I fall in love in the moment. You can read any apointments I wrote previously here, and here (in spanish) but today I’ll explain how to restore files and directories from previous commits that it was deleted by a mistake or intentionally in the past. It’s quite easy to revert or reset a single file from history, but what about pulling an entire directory out of the history? The solution is simple: git checkout ID_of_commit -- /path/to/dir This will restore the directory from the given “commit with ID” in the /path/to/dir. But, let me show you a mistake I made in a commit into the gnome-system-tools repository: I send a translation for a GNOME app in Galician and (I don’t know how) accidentally, I deleted the directory icons. For make this more complicated there were a lot of commits ahead of my commit. In the previous image the highlighted commit is where I deleted the directory. If you issue at you terminal within the app directory:

    ➜  gnome-system-tools git:(master) git reflog
    cc9cead HEAD@{0}: commit: Restore deleted icons directory, deleted by a mistake.
    77f6382 HEAD@{1}: pull : Fast-forward
    a01e094 HEAD@{2}: a01e094fa09fceaaf86a78d668a5e431338050bf: updating HEAD
    b833072 HEAD@{3}: b8330723f6efb8ecf1e07cb01b17d524a6748a38: updating HEAD
    e6808e5 HEAD@{4}: pull : Fast-forward
    b833072 HEAD@{5}: b8330723f6efb8ecf1e07cb01b17d524a6748a38: updating HEAD
    e6808e5 HEAD@{6}: pull : Fast-forward
    fa069b2 HEAD@{7}: commit: Added gl to DOC_LINGUAS into Makefile.am for services and time documentation
    5cc13f5 HEAD@{8}: commit: Updated galician translations, and added galician translations for time and services documentation
    2915e6e HEAD@{9}: pull : Fast-forward
    b833072 HEAD@{10}: commit: Updated Galician translations  <------ this is the commit
    a01e094 HEAD@{11}: pull : Fast-forward

you’ll see the ID that points to that commit. So applying the ^ modifier to the damned ID I can obtain the previous commit ID, this one has the icons directory and now is when the magic comes in:

➜  gnome-system-tools git:(master) git checkout b833072^ -- icons/
➜  gnome-system-tools git:(master) ✗ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD ..." to unstage)
#
#   new file:   icons/16x16/Makefile.am
#   new file:   icons/16x16/apps/Makefile.am
#   new file:   icons/16x16/apps/time-admin.png
#   new file:   icons/16x16/apps/time-admin.svg
#   new file:   icons/22x22/Makefile.am
#   new file:   icons/22x22/apps/Makefile.am
#   new file:   icons/22x22/