I put this in my terminal (mac) because I wanted to delete “.iml” files now it deleted my src folder and the git history is gone. Please how do I undo this?
find . -name “*.iml” -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch
echo *.iml >> .gitignore
I don’t see how those commands could have deleted your .git directory. Are you sure you didn’t issue any other commands?
Anyway, assuming there is a remote git repository somewhere, the easiest way is probably to delete the entire directory and clone the remote repository anew.
Those are the only commands I used. I ran the command in IntelliJ terminal. It deleted the “.idea” folders and specifically the files with “.iml” and the project folder itself. Then the git history wasn’t there. What I mean by that is when I clicked the VCS it didn’t give me the option to commit, push. It gave my the option to share to GitHub even though I have already shared that project to GitHub before. The problem is I have uncommitted changes. Is there no other way apart from cloning? Im still new to coding. This is a very important project. I was reading online about git hard reset, would that work?
Update: I did “git restore -s=HEAD --staged --worktree – .” based on a post on StackOverflow then it said “fatal: could not resolve =HEAD” then I tried “.git/refs/heads/master” to try and get the directory back then it said “zsh: permission denied: .git/refs/heads/master” then I did “git reset --hard” then it said “HEAD is now at ” but the “git restore .” or or any git restore doesn’t work after. Please how do I fix this?? I really need to fix it soon
@Thallius is this something you can help with?
Surely if it’s a very important project there is more than one copy?
Also, it would be wise at this point to backup the directory you do have, given you seem to blindly copy/paste and then execute commands from Stack Overflow …
I wasn’t “blindly” copying and pasting. I was just trying to delete the “.iml” files. I don’t know how to backup. Again, I’m new to coding.
As already noted, this should not have affected the git history… but your editor config (including the git view) might now be broken, do you get anything at all when just running git log from the terminal? You might also try to remove (or rename) the .idea folder altogether to reset the configuration for your project…
Just copy/paste the directory to another location.
it now shows the head on git log because i did git reset --hard but still isnt connected to ide
Update: I just ended up deleting that repo and cloning the last commit from GitHub to add in the changes because I couldn’t figure out how to undo the command.
A little late, but looks like OP ran the delete command. I’m sure it deleted more than just the .git folder.
@mangoabacaxi You shouldn’t copy and paste random commands unless you know what they really do. rm in the *NIX world means to “remove” and the flag -f is to force it to remove. There is no source following it so I would be very worried as it could potentially remove your entire system altogether.
If you really need to delete certain files, why not create a bash script to delete specific files you don’t want? Or even better, add those files to your .gitignore file and let Git do the rest for you?
Because git doesn’t actively remove files you add to .gitignore. You still need to git rm them to get them out of git. .gitignore only prevents new files being added.
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I wasn’t copying & pasting “random” commands. I specifically looked up how to do what I was trying to do. I realized it didn’t even delete the .git folder. and it was still there, just somehow disconnected from the ide and was able to see the head of last commit to try to get it back. I already added the files I didn’t need to the .gitignore and it still did this but really it was the folder I didn’t need that got deleted in this whole mess and messed with my git directory a bit. Im good now though but thanks for your input.
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