What's the simplest way to amend a commit in order to revert the modifications made to a single file?

Question

Currently, when I have to do it, here are the steps that I follow:

• Revert the commit (without creating a new commit, of course)
• Reset all the modification introduced by the “revert,” except the one of the file that I wand to revert
• Stage the reversal of the file which I want to revert and amend the last commit

Is there a more straightforward way to do that?

Answer 1

Checkout the previous state of the file and amend the commit.

git checkout HEAD^ -- file.txt
git commit --amend

If you don't need to amend the commit log message the last command can be

git commit --amend -C HEAD

which doesn't even open your editor to edit the commit log, it just amends it.