How can I roll back 1 file change in my previous commit

Question

I have made 2 commits (And I have not pushed) in git, where 'Commit 2' is the most recent one':

 git log -2
commit 791962d776f66253d656586b097b2677eaa983d1
Author: michael <michael@michael-laptop.(none)>
Date:   Tue Jun 29 23:20:58 2010 -0700

    Commit 2

commit b743075e81f6fe25fe48ddbef2b5e7cc06623533
Author: michael <michael@michael-laptop.(none)>
Date:   Tue Feb 16 23:09:53 2010 -0800

    Commit 1

And in my commit 1 b743075e81f6fe25fe48ddbef2b5e7cc06623533, I touched/changed a number of files:

   dir1/file1.cpp
   dir1/file1.h
   dir1/file2.cpp
   dir1/file2.h

My questions is, how can I roll back my changes that I made to dir1/file2.cpp, dir1/file2.h of commit 1? And keep everything else the same?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The simplest solution would be, from your latest commit (HEAD) to:

• checkout those two files at the older version,
• add them,
• and then commit.

    git checkout b743075e81 -- dir1/file2.cpp
    git checkout b743075e81 -- dir1/file2.h
    git add dir1/file2.cpp # only if you made additional changes
    git add dir1/file2.h   # only if you made additional changes
    git commit -m "revert dir1/file2.cpp and dir1/file2.h"

As Chris Johnsen mentions in the comments:

git checkout with pathspecs updates the index (like git reset with pathspecs) and the working tree, so git add is not needed unless additional changes are made after the checkout.