Comments on: git: forever remove files or folders from history

By: karl

karl — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:01:24 +0000

This is amazing, thanks so much.

I am having problems with filenames with ” ( ” and ” ) ” in them…

-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `(‘

Any help?

By: Carlos Gant

Carlos Gant — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:40:14 +0000

Thanks so much!, it’s help a lot.

By: Benjamin Oakes

Benjamin Oakes — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 21:07:22 +0000

Thanks so much for writing this, David. It helped us immensely reduce our repository size.

We had been checking a bunch of RubyGems into vendor/cache, which really added up over time. (Note for others: we were using some private gems; what we decided to do instead was include them in vendor/gems as git submodules.)

By: Jason Gaoemaat

Jason Gaoemaat — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:49:38 +0000

Thanks a lot, this worked great for me!

By: Michael Leuchtenburg

Michael Leuchtenburg — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:26:15 +0000

I’m still getting the sensitive info showing up when I do this:
git grep sensitive $(git rev-list –all)

So clearly it’s not actually fully gone. Any suggestions?

I can just zap my history, since I’m just sanitizing my dotfiles repo so I can share it and don’t care much about the history, but I’d rather not.

By: David Underhill

David Underhill — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:43:35 +0000

@Jesse G. Donat Oops, not sure how that typo snuck in there - fixed! No updated version though; I don't use it too frequently and this has served me sufficiently well on the occasions that I've needed it (so far :p).

By: Jesse G. Donat

Jesse G. Donat — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:39:57 +0000

Was checking in to see if there was any sort of updated version of this thing as I still use it quite regularly – I think you have a typo after your exit 0 – you have “exit 0are still” I think you may have been typing in the wrong location.

By: Chris Buckley

Chris Buckley — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:10:10 +0000

Adding -q to the git rm call improves the speed of the script by suppressing its output.

By: Raphael

Raphael — Wed, 18 May 2011 09:40:58 +0000

Thanks so much! One little thing the I realized, git takes ages going over all commits in history. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/872565/how-do-i-remove-sensitive-files-from-gits-history page indicates how you can limit the rewrite to a certain number of commits.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 22:17:39 +0000

Thanks! This saved my butt.