git remove all deleted files from entire history

Question

I was wondering if anybody has a more efficient, more intelligent way to do this. The looping construct requires every deleted files to be expunged from every commit by reading each commit. With many commits, this takes a long time.

git log --pretty=format: --name-status | grep -i ^D | cut -f2- | sort -u | xargs -I {} git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch {}' HEAD

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

5

That seems to remove each files one at a time.
Consider that git rm can take multiple files to be removed.

So one optimization would be to build that list and call the filter-branch once.
You can see one example of that approach in "Proper way to remove unwanted files with git filter-branch without git rm failing".

edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Community

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answered Dec 19 '12 at 07:04

VonC

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I've found `grep -v -x -f /tmp/files-in-repo.txt` along with `xargs --delimiter=\\n -r git rm ... ` useful. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen May 22 '13 at 11:17

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 18 '18 at 12:53

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Just a small improvement to support recursive delete

git filter-branch --prune-empty --index-filter 'git log --pretty=format: --name-status | grep -i ^D | cut -f2- | sort -u | xargs git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch DoesNotExistInMyProject'

answered Aug 18 '18 at 12:53

Omri

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 12 '18 at 07:58

For anyone else who might be looking for the same answer, I modified the original command above with the suggestions linked in the other thread and created this command which seemed to work for me.

git filter-branch --prune-empty --index-filter 'git log --pretty=format: --name-status | grep -i ^D | cut -f2- | sort -u | xargs git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch DoesNotExistInMyProject'

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 07 '18 at 17:16

Improved the command to avoid file names with a ' which causes xargs to bug

echo "/!\ This file contains a single quote ' and it's gonna bug with xargs, so it's excluded from the filter operation" ; bash -c "git log --pretty=format: --name-status | grep -i ^D " | grep \' git filter-branch -f --prune-empty --index-filter "git log --pretty=format: --name-status | grep -i ^D | grep -v \' | cut -f2- | sort -u | xargs git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch DoesNotExistInMyProject"

git remove all deleted files from entire history

4 Answers4