recover file after git rm with no previous history

Question

Not sure there´s a solution to this:

I accidentally staged a directory with:

git add *

then, upon seeing this, I did (major, major mistake, should have of course unstaged)

git rm -r my_directory

To top it all, I followed up with:

git commit -m ¨horrible commit¨

Now the files are nowhere to be found. Is there a way to recover the files?

Thanks

Answer 1

If I'm not mistaken, the git rm shouldn't have deleted this directory but complained:

error: the following file has changes staged in the index: my_directory
(use --cached to keep the file, or -f to force removal)

So the directory should still be there...

If you ran it with -f, sorry, then I guess there's nothing you can do.