Why is git revert telling me "bad revision" when I use a commit hash?

git git-commit git-revert
Ellen Spertus picture Ellen Spertus · Feb 6, 2014 · Viewed 19.2k times · Source

I am trying to revert to an earlier git commit but get the error "bad revision". Why?

Here is a transcript (with author names removed):

Ellen@ELLEN-PC /c/Users/Susan Mills/git/hello-github (master)
$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean

Ellen@ELLEN-PC /c/Users/Susan Mills/git/hello-github (master)
$ git log | head
commit e3eb30cc7ca6d4cd10de755b63821cad75da1e83
Date:   Wed Feb 5 17:54:32 2014 -0800

    I changed my greeting.

commit 063ac580e28bab524286dac7b0a8f88d9e7d365f
Date:   Mon Feb 3 07:53:19 2014 -0800

Ellen@ELLEN-PC /c/Users/Susan Mills/git/hello-github (master)
$ git revert 9e7d365f
fatal: bad revision '9e7d365f'

Why am I getting "bad revision", and what should I do? I am using git bash on Windows 7 with my origin on github.

Answer

Wolf picture Wolf · Feb 6, 2014

When you use the short version of a SHA1, you use the prefix, not the suffix. So you actually want to say:

git revert 063ac580

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