Pipe git diff to git checkout

Question

If I delete a file, I can revert it in git with:

git checkout filename

If I want to revert all deleted files, I can list them with:

git diff --diff-filter=D --name-only

What I then want to do is restore them, but

git diff --diff-filter=D --name-only | git checkout

Doesn't work, it only repeats the list to stdout, and git checkout seems to receive no input. Ditto for | git checkout HEAD -- and so on.

I've tried this in Windows Command Prompt, in Powershell, and in Git Bash, with the same result each time.

How do I correctly pipe input to git checkout?

Answer 1

You cannot use a pipe for this. You can however use Unix's xargs:

git diff --diff-filter=D --name-only | xargs git checkout

xargs is a tool that reads from stdin and puts the lines as arguments next to its own arguments and calls the result. So if git diff generates a line a and a line b, xargs git checkout will - at least conceptually - generate the line git checkout a b and call this as a command.

Answer 2

A pipeline results in the standard output of the command to the left of the pipe being used as the standard input of the command to the right of the pipe. The pipeline git checkout | git diff --diff-filter=D --name-only results in the standard output of the git checkout command being used as the standard input of the git diff --diff-filter=D --name-only command. The git diff command does not use standard input, so the git checkout output is silently ignored and you end up with the output of the git diff command.

Instead, try something like git ls-files --deleted -z | xargs -0 git checkout HEAD --. This uses the null character (\0) to delimit file names and will result in deleted files being checked out. This will work for any valid file names, including those containing spaces and other special characters.