Why doesn't git pull bring back directories that I've deleted?

Question

I've just started learning how to use git today, progressing well.

As an experiment, I used push to upload two directories (containing two files each) and two files in the root directory. This worked fine.

I then deleted one of the two directories that I have locally (but not on git). When I use git status it seems to be aware of this:

deleted: test/Testfile.as
deleted: test/Testile2.as

But when I use git pull to get my files back, they don't seem to return to my local folder. I've also tried git fetch.

The only way I seem to be able to get everything back is git clone, but that doesn't seem logical as I need to delete my master directory locally and then clone it back again (or alternatively specify a new location for the cloned files).

What is the appropriate way to retrieve files and folders from github that have been deleted locally?

Answer 1

git pull just merges the fetched commits in your working directory and will not restore your deleted directory ( but might warn you about conflicts.)

If you have deleted the folders in your working directory, you have to do:

git checkout -- test 

to get it back.

Or you can do git reset --hard to completely bring your working directory to HEAD state.

Answer 2

you want to return your repository to the previous working version. this is a job for git-reset.

git reset --hard 

be sure to read through this useful explanation of git-reset

you could also check out those files if you wanted to:

git checkout -- test/