I&#39;m using the following sources to expunge some large files and directories from my repository:

http://dound.com/2009/04/git-forever-remove-files-or-folders-from-history/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1029969/why-is-my-git-repository-so-big/1036595#1036595


`git filter-branch` only seems to work on the current branch - is there a way to apply it to all branches at once?

git, filter-branch on all branches

I have a Git repo converted from SVN to Mercurial to Git, and I wanted to extract just one source file. I also had weird characters like `a&#204;` (an encoding mismatch corrupted Unicode `&#228;`) and spaces in the filenames.

How can I extract one file from a repository and place it at the root of the new repo?

How to extract one file with commit history from a Git repo with index-filter &amp; co?

I&#39;m afraid I couldn&#39;t find anything quite like this particular scenario.

I have a git repository with a lot of history: 500+ branches, 500+ tags, going back to mid-2007. It contains ~19,500 commits. We&#39;d like to remove all of the history before Jan 1, 2010, to make it smaller and easier to deal with (we would keep a complete copy of the history in an archive repository).

I know the commit that I want to have become the root of the new repository. I can&#39;t, however, figure out the correct git mojo to truncate the repo to start with that commit. I&#39;m guessing some variant of 

    git filter-branch

involving grafts would be necessary; it might also be necessary to treat each of the 200+ branches we want to keep separately and then patch the repo back together (something I _do_ know how to do).

Has anyone ever done something like this? I&#39;ve got git 1.7.2.3 if that matters.

How do I remove the old history from a git repository?

This question is based on [Detach subdirectory into separate Git repository][1] 

Instead of detaching a single subdirectory, I want to detach a couple. For example, my current directory tree looks like this:

    /apps
      /AAA
      /BBB
      /CCC
    /libs
      /XXX
      /YYY
      /ZZZ

And I would like this instead:

    /apps
      /AAA
    /libs
      /XXX
The `--subdirectory-filter` argument to `git filter-branch` won&#39;t work because it gets rid of everything except for the given directory the first time it&#39;s run. I thought using the `--index-filter` argument for all unwanted files would work (albeit tedious), but if I try running it more than once, I get the following message:

    Cannot create a new backup.
    A previous backup already exists in refs/original/
    Force overwriting the backup with -f
Any ideas? TIA


  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-into-separate-git-repository

Detach many subdirectories into a new, separate Git repository

I was writing a simple script on the school computer, and committing the changes to Git (in a repo that was in my pen drive, cloned from my computer at home). After several commits, I realized I was committing stuff as the root user.

Is there any way to change the author of these commits to my name?


How to change the author and committer name and e-mail of multiple commits in Git?

I tried to remove a file from my remote repo by running:

    git filter-branch --index-filter &#39;git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch Rakefile&#39; HEAD

But Git complains that 

&gt; Cannot create new backup. A previous backup already exists in refs/original/  
Force overwriting the backup with -f  
rm: cannot remove /.git-rewrite/backup-refs : Permission denied    
rm: cannot remove directory /.git-rewrite : Directory not empty

This was after I already deleted the .git-rewrite directory on Windows.

How can I remove that file? It&#39;s a 29Mb file sitting on my repo, so I quite need to remove the file. 

I tried to delete the commit in `git rebase -i`, but apparently because the commit touched a lot of different files, Git complains of conflicts and I aborted to be safe.

Purging file from Git repo failed, unable to create new backup

I want to change something in the first commit of my project with out losing all subsequent commits. Is there any way to do this?

I accidentally listed my raw email in a comment within the source code, and I&#39;d like to change it as I&#39;m getting spammed from bots indexing GitHub.

Change first commit of project with Git?

I would like to change my name, surname and email in my all commits, is it possible?

Could I change my name and surname in all previous commits?

I  added over 9000 photos by accident to my project folder. And committed them. Then deleted them from disk. Committed. 

Now I try to push changes to git server. But it takes too long and tries to send 12 Gb of data. 

I checked files size on disk and see that really `.git` folder takes 12 Gb. 

**How to delete photos** from there? I tried `git rm`, but fails:

    ❯ git rm public/photos
    fatal: pathspec &#39;public/photos&#39; did not match any files

Because I allready deleted them from disk, but they are still in `.git` folder. 

I tried to add `public/photos` to `.gitignore`:

    public/photos/
    *.zip

But no result.
Of course I could `hard reset head` to moment when I did not have so many junk photos in my project. But since that time i committed many times and made a lot changes in code.  

git rm - fatal: pathspec did not match any files

I would like to put a Git project on GitHub but it contains certain files with sensitive data (usernames and passwords, like /config/deploy.rb for capistrano).

I know I can add these filenames to **.gitignore**, but this would not remove their history within Git.

I also don&#39;t want to start over again by deleting the /.git directory.

Is there a way to remove **all** traces of a particular file in your Git history?

Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history

After successfully converting an SVN repository to Git, I now have a very large Git repository that I want to break down into multiple smaller repositories and maintain history.

So, can someone help with breaking up a repo that might look like this:

    MyHugeRepo/
       .git/
       DIR_A/
       DIR_B/
       DIR_1/
       DIR_2/

Into two repositories that look like this:

    MyABRepo/
       .git
       DIR_A/
       DIR_B/
    
    My12Repo/
       .git
       DIR_1/
       DIR_2/

 I&#39;ve tried following directions in this previous question but it doesn&#39;t really fit when trying to put multiple directories into a separate repo ([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-into-separate-git-repository][1]). 




    


  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-into-separate-git-repository 

Split large Git repository into many smaller ones

I have a [Git][1] repository which contains a number of subdirectories. Now I have found that one of the subdirectories is unrelated to the other and should be detached to a separate repository.

How can I do this while keeping the history of the files within the subdirectory?

I guess I could make a clone and remove the unwanted parts of each clone, but I suppose this would give me the complete tree when checking out an older revision etc. This might be acceptable, but I would prefer to be able to pretend that the two repositories doesn&#39;t have a shared history.

Just to make it clear, I have the following structure:

    XYZ/
        .git/
        XY1/
        ABC/
        XY2/

But I would like this instead:

    XYZ/
        .git/
        XY1/
        XY2/
    ABC/
        .git/
        ABC/

  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29


Detach (move) subdirectory into separate Git repository

I accidentally committed an unwanted file (`filename.orig` while resolving a merge) to my repository several commits ago, without me noticing it until now. I want to completely delete the file from the repository history. 

Is it possible to rewrite the change history such that `filename.orig` was never added to the repository in the first place?


How do you fix a bad merge, and replay your good commits onto a fixed merge?

I accidentally added a folder of images and committed. Then, I made one more commit.
Then I removed those files using `git rm -f ./images` and committed again. 

Right now, I have made a lot more commits in that branch (master). In my HEAD, I don&#39;t have that `./static/images` folder.

Due to this, my repo size has increased a lot. How can I remove those blobs completely? And I want to remove it from my remote GitHub repo too.

Completely remove files from Git repo and remote on GitHub

How do I remove commits which have no changeset using git filter-branch?

I rewrote my git history using:

&lt;!-- language: lang-bash --&gt;

    git filter-branch --tree-filter &#39;rm -r -f my_folder&#39; -f HEAD

this worked out well but now I have lots of commits with empty changesets. I would like to remove those commits. Preferably in msysgit.

Rebasing is not really an option because I have over 4000 commits and half of them must be removed.

Git - remove commits with empty changeset using filter-branch

Let&#39;s say I have a repo that includes this directory structure:

    repo/
      blog/
        _posts/
          some-post.html
      another-file.txt

I want to move `_posts` to the top level of the repo, so the structure will look like this:

    repo/
      _posts/
        some-post.html
      another-file.txt

This is simple enough with `git mv`, but I want to make the history look as though `_posts` *always* existed at the root of the repo, and I want to be able to get the entire history of `some-post.html` via `git log -- _posts/some-post.html`. I imagine I can use some magic with `git filter-branch` to accomplish this, but I haven&#39;t figured out exactly how to do that. Any ideas?

How can I move a directory in a Git repo for all commits?

I have a project under `git`. One day I moved all project files from current directory to `foo/bar/` under the project. I did it using `git mv`. Then I added some more files and did some changes to already existing files.

As a result, now when I look at the history of `foo/bar/file.c`, I can only see changes that I did after I moved the file.

I tried to fix this in various ways (`filter-branch` with subdirectory filter, etc), but nothing helped, so I am pretty stacked here. I&#39;ll appreciate any help that you can give me.
Thanks!

How can I rewrite history so that all files, except the ones I already moved, are in a subdirectory?

    git filter-branch --env-filter &#39;
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=&quot;foo@example.com&quot;
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME=&quot;foo&quot;&#39; -- commita..commitb

Results in `Which ref do you want to rewrite?`

So it seems that `filter-branch` doesn&#39;t allow you to &lt;s&gt;use range notation&lt;/s&gt; use a range between two arbitrary refs.

What is the most straight forward way of running a filter over a range of consecutive commits (somewhere within the history of a branch) if this approach isn&#39;t possible.

All Git Filter-Branch Solutions on Gang of Coders

Total of 18 Git Filter-Branch Solutions