While working on something unrelated I just did a quick hack in include/linux/config.h When done I wanted to get rid of the changes so I did: git reset --hard include/linux/config.h And the changes made to include/linux/config.h was indeed gone, with all the other changes I had in other files. Now git reset is maybe supposed to work on commit level only, but it would have been nice if it erroroed out when it saw an argument that it did not know about. In this case I assume git reset used "include/linux/config.h" as <commitish>. Also what is the right command to bring back a file to the original state after doing some modifications that was not needed anyway? Sam - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html