Author: Sahil Suri

Introduction In our previous article on working with the git version control system, we explained how to use the git checkout command to retrieve previously committed versions of files from the git repository. In this article, we will talk about a situation that arises if you don’t mention a file name while running the git checkout command and simply type ‘git checkout HEAD~n’ where n is the commit to which to want to move the head to. How does a repository go into a detached HEAD state? Using the git checkout command we generally check out a branch of the repository to work with the content within that branch. We’ll talk about branches in detail in a separate article.  For the time being, we’ll define branches as movable pointers to commits in the version history of our git repository. When we initialize a git repository we work with a default branch named master. We may create further branches and subsequently work with those branches. Let’s take a look at the state of the files inside the repository we’ve been using four commits before the current committed state. [sahil@linuxnix my_first_repo]$ git diff HEAD~4 diff --git a/README.md b/README.md deleted file mode 100644 index ba76a74..0000000 --- a/README.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -This is a readme file for my first git repository diff --git a/test.txt b/test.txt index c66d471..e945f40 100644 --- a/test.txt +++...