Tochukwu Uzochukwu

How to modify an old commit

1 min read

There are times when you may have an existing commit, but you have just made changes to a file or a couple of files. Perhaps you don’t want to create a new commit, but you would rather modify the old commit and add your changes to it. Below are the Git commands I use in such cases.

git add < changed files >
git commit --fixup=<OLDCOMMIT sha-value>
git rebase --interactive --autosquash OLDCOMMIT^

explanation

  • git commit --fixup=<OLDCOMMIT sha-value>: This command takes the message of the OLDCOMMIT and automatically apply fixup! to it which is similar to when you run an interactive rebase and you apply the fixup option.

  • git rebase --interactive --autosquash OLDCOMMIT^: The caret(^) symbol here refers to the parent commit of OLDCOMMIT. --autosquash OLDCOMMIT automatically puts any --fixup=OLDCOMMIT in the correct order. Note that –autosquash is only valid when the –interactive option is used.