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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T01:13:20+00:00

I was trying to push a new patch set to an existing change under

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I was trying to push a new patch set to an existing change under review in Gerrit with:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/foo

but it failed with an error that the change was already closed. Then, I foolishly tried:

git push . HEAD:refs/for/foo

which seemed successful, but when I checked Gerrit, there was no new patch set. I think part of the reason was that my commit comment did not contain the Gerrit change ID that I wanted to push to. But what did the last command actually do? And how can I undo it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The “.” argument means “push to this repository”, and the refspec HEAD:refs/for/foo means “take the current commit that HEAD is pointing to, and make a new ref (similar to a branch, although those are usually stored as refs/heads/something) named refs/for/foo that points to the same commit”.

    Essentially, it’s creating a new “branch” at the current commit, but since the desired name isn’t in the normal branch name-space, we can’t just use git branch refs/for/foo.

    You should be able to undo it with git push . :refs/for/foo – naming an empty source to replace the ref with.

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