How to undo git rm -rf dirname without a first commit?

Question

I did:

git init
git add .
git rm -rf dirname

Looking at other answsers, git reset --hard HEAD, git checkout -f and git reflog did not work, apparently because there is no HEAD to go back to, nor a commit to get the files back from.

Is there a way to get the files back?

Answer 1

Warning: Running git prune without the -n option (1) will erase your unreachable data.

There may be a way, using git prune and git cat-file.

Running git prune -n will list which objects would be removed by pruning:

$ git prune -n
9cc84ea9b4d95453215d0c26489d6a78694e0bc6 blob
c315143703752ef4d11ca7d93f2c324872b2ebff blob

Each line corresponds to a deleted file.

Now, using git cat-file, we are able to restore the contents of the removed file to a new file:

git cat-file -p 9cc84ea9b4d95453215d0c26489d6a78694e0bc6 > restored-filename

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(1) From the git prune docs:

NAME
git-prune - Prune all unreachable objects from the object database

OPTIONS
-n
--dry-run
Do not remove anything; just report what it would remove.