How to restore a whole directory from history of git repository?

Question

I would like to restore a whole directory (recursively) from the history of my git repository.

There is only 1 branch (master).

I know the commit where errors were included.

Can I use the sha1 hash of the parent commit to restore the state of the directory as it was before the errors were included?

I thought about something like this:

git checkout 348ce0aa02d3738e55ac9085080028b548e3d8d3 path/to/the/folder/ 

but it did not work.

Answer 1

try adding '--' between revisions and paths:

git checkout 348ce0aa02d3738e55ac9085080028b548e3d8d3 -- path/to/the/folder/  

And if you want to recover a directory from the previous commit, you can replace the commit hash by HEAD~1, for example:

git checkout HEAD~1 -- path/to/the/folder/  

Answer 2

There are two easy ways to do this:

If the commit that included the errors only included the errors, use git revert to invert the effects of it.

If not, the easy path is this:

1. git checkout 348…
2. cp -a path/to/the/folder ../tmp-restore-folder
3. git checkout HEAD # or whatever
4. rm -rf path/to/the/folder
5. mv ../tmp-restore-folder path/to/the/folder
6. git add path/to/the/folder
7. git commit -m "revert …"