How do I remove a single file from the staging are

Question

Situation: I have a Git repository with files already in the index. I make changes to several files, open Git and add these files to my staging area with "git add ."

Question: How do I remove one of those files from the staging area but not remove it from the index or undo the changes to the file itself?

Answer 1

You want:

• Affect to a single file

• Remove file from staging area

• Not remove single file from index

• Don't undo the change itself

and the solution is

git reset HEAD file_name.ext

or

git reset HEAD path/to/file/file_name.ext

Answer 2

To unstage everything at once, run this command

git reset HEAD -- .

Answer 3

You need to be in the directory of the file and then type the following into the terminal

git reset HEAD .

Assumption is that you need to reset one file only.

Answer 4

In case you just want to remove a subset of the changes to your file, you can use:

git reset -p

or

git reset -p <file_name>

This command is basically the reverse of git add -p: it will only remove the selected changes from the staging area. I find it extremely useful in "unadding" something that I added by mistake.

Answer 5

If you want to remove files following a certain pattern and you are using git rm --cached, you can use file-glob patterns too.

See here.

Answer 6

In my case, I do

git checkout -- FILE