# Amending a Commit

What if you commit a change to your remote repository only to realize later that you have a typo in the commit message or you forgot to add a line in your most recent commit.
How do you edit that? This is what this tutorial covers.

## Changing a recent commit message after you have pushed to Github.
To do this without opening a file:
*   Type in the ```git commit --amend -m "followed by your new commit message"```
*   Run ```git push origin <branch-name>``` to commit the changes to the repository.

Note: If you type in just ```git commit --amend```, your text editor would open up prompting you to edit the commit message.
Adding the ``-m`` flags prevents it.

## Modifying on a single commit

So, what if we forgot to make a minor change to a file like changing a single word and we have already pushed the commit to our remote repository?

To illustrate here is a log of my commits:
```
g56123f create file bot file
a2235d updated contributor.md
a5da0d modified bot file
```
Let's say I forgot to add a single word to the bot file

There are 2 ways to go about this. The first is to have an entirely new commit that contains the change like so:
```
g56123f create file botfile
a2235d updated contributor.md
a5da0d modified botfile
b0ca8f added single word to botfile
```
The second way is to amend the a5da0d commit, add this new word and  push it to Github as one commit.
The second sounds better since it is just a minor change.

To achieve this, we would do the following:
*   Modify the file. In this case, I will modify the botfile to include the word I omitted previously.
*   Next, add the file to the staging area with ```git add <filename>```

Usually after adding files to the staging area, the next thing we do is git commit -m "our commit message" right?
But since what we want to achieve here is to amend the previous commit, we would instead run:

* ```git commit --amend```
 This would then bring up the text editor and prompt you to edit the message. You can decide to leave the message as it was before or change it.
* Exit the editor
* Push your changes with ```git push origin <branch-name>```

That way, both changes would be in one single commit.