Question

OK, so I added and committed an entire subdirectory to git (no push yet, still local, to .git).

I then deleted the entire subdirectory. (.git is still there.)

I now want it back, from git. How do I do that?

I tried git checkout but it only lists the delete files in that subdirectory.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

You have to do git checkout subdirname

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You can also do git checkout -- subdirname

The -- is used to avoid ambiguity ( like say if you had a branch that was named subdirname and other corner cases.) Below is a snippet from man for git checkout:

If you have an unfortunate branch that is named hello.c, this step would be confused as an instruction to switch to that branch. You should instead write:

$ git checkout -- hello.c

http://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout