Modifying the History - Git Recipes - page 277

soft , --mixed , --hard that influence its behavior. Their meaning is summarized
in Table 8-1 .
Table 8-1 . The options --soft, --mixed, --hard of the $ git reset command
Table 8-1 informs us that --soft option influences only HEAD , --mixed option
influences HEAD and the staging area. The third option ( --hard ) influences all three
snapshots: HEAD , the staging area, and the working directory.
The operation we already know quite well is:
$ git reset --hard [REVISION]
The internals of this operation can be described as:
• Modification of HEAD : update the HEAD so that it points to the
[REVISION]
• Modificationofthestagingarea:takethesnapshotsothatitisnowpointed
by the HEAD and store it in the staging area
• Modification of the working directory: take the snapshot now pointed by
the HEAD and check it out into the working directory
After the command all three snapshots are exactly the same. Your current revision is
[REVISION] . Be careful: this command modifies the working directory. As you
already know you will lose uncommitted changes!
The second option, --mixed is default. Thus both the following commands are
identical:
$ git reset --mixed [REVISION]
$ git reset [REVISION]