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It's nearly impossible to completely loose a file if it is commited to git. It's likely harder to fully remove the file than it is to recover it, but how do we go about recovering those precious files that we have lost.

Listing all the deleted files in all of git history can be done by combining git log with --diff-filter. The log gives you lots of options to show different bits of information about the commit that happened at that point. It's even possible to get a completely clean list of files that are in your git history but have been deleted.

git log --diff-filter

These various commands will show all files that were ever deleted on your current branch.








        

# This one includes the date, commit hash, and Author
git log --diff-filter D

# this one could be a git alias, but includes empty lines
git log --diff-filter D --pretty="format:" --name-only

# this one has the empty lines cleaned up
git log --diff-filter D --pretty="format:" --name-only | sed '/^$/d'

git reflog --diff-filter

The reflog can be super powerful in finding lost files here, as it only cares about git operations, not just the current branch. It will search accross all branches for deleted files and report them.








        

# This one includes the commit hash, branch, tag, and commit message
git reflog --diff-filter D

# You might want to at least add the filename
git reflog --diff-filter D --name-only

# this one could be a git alias, but includes empty lines
git reflog --diff-filter D --pretty="format:" --name-only

# this one has the empty lines cleaned up
git reflog --diff-filter D --pretty="format:" --name-only | sed '/^$/d'

get the last commit from a file








        

git log -n 1 --pretty=format:%H -- file