Question

I merge to main, and I’m not satisfied. For instance foo.c is not the version I want, and I want a version from commit “blah” on branch “bar”. What I do now is checkout “blah” on branch “bar” copy everything in file foo.c in a text editor, checkout main again, open the version of foo.c I didn’t like, and then clobber it by pasting in what I’ve copying.

There’s got to be a better way.

Any insight?

Answer 1

 git checkout bar path/to/foo.c

should do it. However, if you would like to see what foo.c contains you can use git show:

 git show <some sha1 or other reference>:path/to/foo.c

so to see what the file contained 2 commits ago, you can:

 git show HEAD^^:path/to/foo.c

current commit’s copy can be shortened to:

 git show :path/to/foo.c