Question

Any idea how to recover local changes in a git repo after a find . -type f | xargs sed -i 's/[\t ]*$//g' in repo root dir?

Answer 1

Since I misunderstood the question at first, I think I should clarify that the problem here is that the command you’ve run will also have rewritten files in the git’s objects directory. (Clearly the files in your working tree can be restored using the usual suggestions of git reset --hard, with the usual caveat that uncommitted local changes will be lost.)

I haven’t had to deal with this situation myself, but I would suggest the following:

1. Copy your corrupted repository to somewhere save just in case trying to repair the damage makes things worse.
2. Try running: git fsck to assess the damage – among other checks, this will see which files’ contents no longer match their hashes.
3. Try to find any clone of the repository that was last fetched from before the corruption (and carefully preserve a copy of it). You can use this in place of the corrupted repository if you’re careful to update .git/config correctly and get the file permissions right.