How to revert a "git rm -r ."?

git reset HEAD

Should do it. If you don't have any uncommitted changes that you care about, then

git reset --hard HEAD

should forcibly reset everything to your last commit. If you do have uncommitted changes, but the first command doesn't work, then save your uncommitted changes with git stash:

git stash
git reset --hard HEAD
git stash pop

I git-rm'd a few files and went on making changes before my next commit when I realized I needed some of those files back. Rather than stash and reset, you can simply checkout the individual files you missed/removed if you want:

git checkout HEAD path/to/file path/to/another_file

This leaves your other uncommitted changes intact with no workarounds.

To regain some single files or folders one may use the following

git reset -- path/to/file
git checkout -- path/to/file

This will first recreate the index entries for path/to/file and recreate the file as it was in the last commit, i.e.HEAD.

Hint: one may pass a commit hash to both commands to recreate files from an older commit. See git reset --help and git checkout --help for details.

Update:

Since git rm . deletes all files in this and child directories in the working checkout as well as in the index, you need to undo each of these changes:

git reset HEAD . # This undoes the index changes
git checkout .   # This checks out files in this and child directories from the HEAD

This should do what you want. It does not affect parent folders of your checked-out code or index.

Old answer that wasn't:

reset HEAD

will do the trick, and will not erase any uncommitted changes you have made to your files.

after that you need to repeat any git add commands you had queued up.

If you end up with none of the above working, you might be able to retrieve data using the suggestion from here: http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg62499.html

git prune -n
git cat-file -p <blob #>

undo git rm

git rm file             # delete file & update index
git checkout HEAD file  # restore file & index from HEAD

undo git rm -r

git rm -r dir          # delete tracked files in dir & update index
git checkout HEAD dir  # restore file & index from HEAD

undo git rm -rf

git rm -r dir          # delete tracked files & delete uncommitted changes
not possible           # `uncommitted changes` can not be restored.

Uncommitted changes includes not staged changes, staged changes but not committed.

If you've committed and pushed the changes, you can do this to get the file back

// Replace 2 with the # of commits back before the file was deleted.
git checkout HEAD~2 path/to/file

There are some good answers already, but I might suggest a little-used syntax that not only works great, but is very explicit in what you want (therefor not scary or mysterious)

git checkout <branch>@{"20 minutes ago"} <filename>

Get list commit

git log  --oneline

For example, Stable commit has hash: 45ff319c360cd7bd5442c0fbbe14202d20ccdf81

git reset --hard 45ff319c360cd7bd5442c0fbbe14202d20ccdf81
git push -ff origin master

I had an identical situation. In my case the solution was:

git checkout -- .

With Git 2.23+ (August 2019), the proper command to restore files (and the index) woud be to use... git restore (not reset --hard or the confusing git checkout command)

That is:

git restore -s=HEAD --staged --worktree -- .

Or its abbreviated form:

git restore -s@ -SW -- .

If you execute the command git rm -r --cached . on a repo with changes that are not staged (so not committed either), you can undo the operation (unstage from deletion) with the command git restore --staged .

So in a nutshell, to undo git rm -r --cached . you only need to run git restore --staged .

I had exactly the same issue: was cleaning up my folders, rearranging and moving files. I entered: git rm . and hit enter; and then felt my bowels loosen a bit. Luckily, I didn't type in git commit -m "" straightaway.

However, the following command

git checkout .

restored everything, and saved my life.