Question

I know that I can use git commit --amend --file=path-to-my-new-message but this will amend staged changes, too. Of course, I could stash and later apply&drop the stash, but is there a quicker solution to change the HEAD commit message without committing the staged changes (and user interaction)?

Answer 1

According to the man page git commit --amend --only without any paths specified should do the job, however this doesn’t work for me. As a work-around you may temporarily add a file and remove it again, amending two times:

touch tmp
git add tmp
git commit --amend -m "new message" tmp
git rm tmp
git commit --amend -m "new message" tmp