I was working with a friend on a project, and he edited a bunch of files that shouldn't have been edited. Somehow I merged his work into mine, either when I pulled it, or when I tried to just pick the specific files out that I wanted. I've been looking and playing for a long time, trying to figure out how to remove the commits that contain the edits to those files, it seems to be a toss up between revert and rebase, and there are no straightforward examples, and the docs assume I know more than I do.

So here is a simplified version of the question:

Given the following scenario, how do I remove commit 2?

$ mkdir git_revert_test && cd git_revert_test

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/josh/deleteme/git_revert_test/.git/

$ echo "line 1" > myfile

$ git add -A

$ git commit -m "commit 1"
[master (root-commit) 8230fa3] commit 1
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 myfile

$ echo "line 2" >> myfile

$ git commit -am "commit 2"
[master 342f9bb] commit 2
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

$ echo "line 3" >> myfile

$ git commit -am "commit 3"
[master 1bcb872] commit 3
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

The expected result is

$ cat myfile
line 1
line 3

Here is an example of how I have been trying to revert

$ git revert 342f9bb
Automatic revert failed.  After resolving the conflicts,
mark the corrected paths with 'git add <paths>' or 'git rm <paths>'
and commit the result.