How to discard staged changes in git without effecting unstaged changes [duplicate]

Question

In order to include some untracked files in my commit I followed this post and accidently added a lot of unwanted stuff. Now I have this situation in my repo.

2016-02-02 16:51 Unknown            o Staged changes <--- untracked files
2016-02-02 16:51 Unknown            o Unstaged changes <-- want to preserve
2016-01-04 17:01 XXXXX YYYYY        I [wool_task_conversion] [master] [origin/HEAD] [origin/master] First commit

I now want to bring back the untracked files in thier original position i.e. the unstaged area as before preserving the changes in unstaged area for tracked files.

Answer 1

If you look at the output of git status it actually answers this question:

Davids-Mac-Pro:DAD dhoelzer$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

    new file:   t

So, simply executing git reset HEAD <file> will do what you are asking.

If you want to remove all staged changes while retaining the changes, the following should be correct:

 git reset HEAD -- .

This should be run from the root of your project.