How to revert thousands of pending changes after losing files due to terminal mistakes

Question

I was trying to clean up some files on my system, but I ended up deleting important files without realizing it. As a result, I lost all of my files and now I have thousands of pending changes in my Git repository. I have tried to revert the changes using git reset, git checkout, and git stash, but nothing seems to be working. Is there any way to revert all of my changes and start fresh? I get this error : "another git process seems to be running in this repository."

I appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thank you in advance.

"I tried using git reset, git checkout, and git stash to revert the changes in my Git repository, but none of these commands worked. I then ran the command 'git status' and saw that there were thousands of pending changes. I attempted to use 'git add' to stage the changes for commit, but I do not want to commit anything. When I tried to run 'git reset HEAD', I received an error message that said 'fatal: ambiguous argument HEAD: unknown revision or path not in the working tree.' I then tried running 'git reset --hard HEAD', but this did not work either. The error message I received said 'HEAD is not a commit.' I am now stuck and do not know how to revert all of my changes and start fresh."

Answer 1

Assuming you're using linux, the ps command (with various options) will tell you if there is actually a git process running. Probably not, in which case you just need to delete the .git/index.lock file (or something similar) that git is using to know that another process is running.

Then, to undo all your changes, something like

git restore --staged -- .
git reset --hard HEAD # or possibly git reset --hard @{U}