Question

I made a mistake and accidentally was committing to master for a while, and now that I’ve realized my mistake, I want to move those commit off of the master and back into my own staging branch.

Is this possible, to do with git or am I going to have to manually move files around?

Answer 1

If your mistakes are such that master currently looks like:

A->B->C->D

and you just want to move C and D to a new branch, it’s pretty easy:

$ git checkout master      # move to D
$ git branch new-branch    # create new branch at D
$ git reset B-sha1         # reset master to B
$ git checkout new-branch  # continue working on new-branch

Depending on what changes are introduced by C and D, this may not work cleanly. For example, if C introduces a new file, git may not let you do the checkout of new-branch for fear of overwriting the file. (When master is checked out at B, git thinks the file is untracked.) You could add a git clean -xdf after the reset, or do reset --hard depending on the circumstances.