Restore git files deleted after git merge --abort

Question

I've lost files added to git during "merge conflict" phase.

Step by step:

git pull
git status

Git informs me about "merge conflict", that's okay. Then I create a new file and add it to git.

vi test.txt
git add test.txt

After that, abort merge:

git merge --abort

I have not found the file "test.txt" neither in directory, nor via "git fsck", nor "git reflog". Is it possible to restore the file?

Answer 1

What have you tried with git fsck ?

see this SO question : Recover files that were added to the index but then removed by a git reset

---

The general answer is : the sequence of instructions you typed has removed the file from tracking (and from the disk), there is no guarantee that the content of your file can be retrieved.

However, git has a lot of safety mechanism, and one of them is : if some data is entered somewhere in the repo, it will not be deleted before two weeks.

(git has a garbage collection mechanism, see git help gc)

---

If you did indeed run git add test.txt at some point, and this action was recent enough, there should still be some trace of the content of the file stored within git :

git fsck --full --unreachable --no-reflog

in git parlance, a file is a blob :

git fsck --full --unreachable --no-reflog | grep blob

This should give you a list of internal git hashes :

unreachable blob 08bf360988858a012dab3af4e0b0ea5f370a2ae8
unreachable blob 21bf7ea93f9f9cc2b3ecbed0e5ed4fa45c75eb89
unreachable blob 08c12ef37075732cf4645269ab5687ba6ba68943
...

note that git add file.txt stores the file's content, not the file's name ...

If you remember a specific string in your file, you can try to narrow your research by using git grep <string> <hash> :

$ git fsck --full --unreachable --no-reflog | grep blob | awk '{ print $3 }' > list.txt
$ cat list.txt | while read blob; do
  if git grep -q "string" $blob; then
    echo $blob
  fi
done

You can then view the whole content of a blob using :

git show $blob

and hopefully find back the file you were looking for.