lifuzu/revert_a_merge.md

Created April 2, 2014 01:47

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revert a merge commit that's already pushed to remote branch

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The -m option specifies the parent number. This is because a merge commit has more than one parent, and Git does not know automatically which parent was the mainline, and which parent was the branch you want to un-merge.

When you view a merge commit in the output of git log, you will see its parents listed on the line that begins with Merge:

commit 8f937c683929b08379097828c8a04350b9b8e183
Merge: 8989ee0 7c6b236
Author: Ben James <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed Aug 17 22:49:41 2011 +0100

Merge branch 'gh-pages'

Conflicts:
    README

In this situation, git revert 8f937c6 -m 1 will get you the tree as it was in 8989ee0, and git revert -m 2 will reinstate the tree as it was in 7c6b236.

Author

lifuzu commented Apr 2, 2014

https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-revert.html
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.txt

Author

lifuzu commented Apr 2, 2014

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1463340/revert-multiple-git-commits

jshields commented Sep 25, 2018

Thank you for the literal explanation on what the parent numbers correspond to, this is the only example I could find that actually pointed out where they appear in the log message.