How to move the HEAD to the latest date in git?

Question

What I wish to do is to get the version of the file that has a specific comment, get it and use it, then change it to the latest code.

git log -g --grep="code submitted version 0.1.2.3"

This returns a hash 123456, then I do:

git checkout 123456

and use the older version.

Now I want to change the HEAD back to the latest. This I could not do. I have tried:

git reset --hard
git clean -f
git pull

Any ideas?

Answer 1

When you called git checkout 123456 you moved your HEAD from the commit you were currently on (most likely the head of the master branch) to the commit 123456. Therefor you are looking for a way to move HEAD back to the branch you were previously on, which you can do with:

git checkout master

If you want to take a look at a specific revision of a file, you can either just view it using

git show 123456:/txt/file.txt

or temporarily check out only this file with

git checkout 123456:/txt/file.txt
// use it
git checkout :/txt/file.txt

Explanation of your tries:

git reset --hard

Reverts all changes of the current HEAD, but does not move HEAD. After a reset, git status shows that everything is "clean".

git clean

Removes all untracked files from the working tree, again HEAD is not moved.

git pull

Fetches the upstream changes and merges them in. Not what you want.