Git checkout - switching back to HEAD

Question

I've been doing my project while at some point I discovered that one thing stopped working. I needed to look up the state of my code when it was working correctly, so I've decided to use git checkout (because I wanted to check-something-out). And so I've done

git checkout SHA 

couple times while going back to point from which I can't go to HEAD, the output is following:

git checkout SHA-HEAD  error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:     [list of files] Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches. Aborting 

I am pretty much sure I have NOT changed anything. The command

git checkout master 

gives the same output.

Is there a way to go back to HEAD?

What is the safe way of "jumping over" history commits?

Answer 1

You can stash (save the changes in temporary box) then, back to master branch HEAD.

$ git add . $ git stash $ git checkout master 

---

Jump Over Commits Back and Forth:

• Go to a specific commit-sha.

    $ git checkout <commit-sha> 

• If you have uncommitted changes here then, you can checkout to a new branch | Add | Commit | Push the current branch to the remote.

    # checkout a new branch, add, commit, push   $ git checkout -b <branch-name>   $ git add .   $ git commit -m 'Commit message'   $ git push origin HEAD          # push the current branch to remote     $ git checkout master           # back to master branch now 

• If you have changes in the specific commit and don't want to keep the changes, you can do stash or reset then checkout to master (or, any other branch).

    # stash   $ git add -A   $ git stash   $ git checkout master    # reset   $ git reset --hard HEAD   $ git checkout master 

• After checking out a specific commit if you have no uncommitted change(s) then, just back to master or other branch.

    $ git status          # see the changes   $ git checkout master    # or, shortcut   $ git checkout -      # back to the previous state