Question

I’m on the master branch.

I made some changes by mistake.

I save those changes (I cp the files to be outside of this git repository)

I git reset --hard HEAD

Now I see:

...
-rw-rw-r--  1 durrantm  1415 Sep 24 10:32 regular_pair_filter_spec.rb
-rw-rw-r--  1 durrantm   474 Sep 24 10:32 ranking_spec.rb
drwxrwxr-x 10 durrantm  4096 Sep 24 10:32 ../
-rw-rw-r--  1 durrantm  7242 Sep 25 08:58 student_spreadsheet_spec.rb
-rw-rw-r--  1 durrantm  5400 Sep 25 08:58 iep_service_spreadsheet_spec.rb
-rw-rw-r--  1 durrantm 52487 Sep 25 08:58 schedule_spec.rb
drwxrwxr-x  2 durrantm  4096 Sep 25 08:58 ./

The files seem ok (changes are gone) but they have update stamps of today.
Is this ok/normal?

Answer 1

Git’s FAQ has an explanation for this.

Git sets the current time as the timestamp on every file it modifies,
but only those. The other files are left untouched, which means build
tools will be able to depend on modification time and rebuild
properly. If build rules change, that can cause a failure anyway, but
that is a far less common problem than accidentally not rebuilding.