Git checkout - switching back to HEAD

Question

I've been doing my project while at some point I discovered that one thing stopped working. I needed to look up the state of my code when it was working correctly, so I've decided to use git checkout (because I wanted to check-something-out). And so I've done

git checkout SHA

couple times while going back to point from which I can't go to HEAD, the output is following:

git checkout SHA-HEAD

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
    [list of files]
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can switch branches.
Aborting

I am pretty much sure I have NOT changed anything. The command

git checkout master

gives the same output.

Is there a way to go back to HEAD?

What is the safe way of "jumping over" history commits?

Answer 1

You can stash (save the changes in temporary box) then, back to master branch HEAD.

$ git add .
$ git stash
$ git checkout master

---

Jump Over Commits Back and Forth:

• Go to a specific commit-sha.

    $ git checkout <commit-sha>
  

• If you have uncommitted changes here then, you can checkout to a new branch | Add | Commit | Push the current branch to the remote.

    # checkout a new branch, add, commit, push
    $ git checkout -b <branch-name>
    $ git add .
    $ git commit -m 'Commit message'
    $ git push origin HEAD          # push the current branch to remote 
  
    $ git checkout master           # back to master branch now
  

• If you have changes in the specific commit and don't want to keep the changes, you can do stash or reset then checkout to master (or, any other branch).

    # stash
    $ git add -A
    $ git stash
    $ git checkout master
  
    # reset
    $ git reset --hard HEAD
    $ git checkout master
  

• After checking out a specific commit if you have no uncommitted change(s) then, just back to master or other branch.

    $ git status          # see the changes
    $ git checkout master
  
    # or, shortcut
    $ git checkout -      # back to the previous state