invalid author/committer line - missing space before email

Question

I have a git repository that was cloned from a bzr repository using git-remote-bzr as follows: git clone bzr::/repo new-repo. After a few hundreds of commits, I executed git fsck and I got the following error for all the bzr commits:

error in commit 41bf5: invalid author/committer line - missing space before email

When I check these revisions with git cat-file -p 41bf5 I can indeed see that the author name and the email are not separated with a space.

How can I add this missing space for all the bad commits ?

I have full access to the repo on the server so I can rewrite the history without any problems. After modifications the users of the code will have to reclone the repository. I already tried without success the solutions proposed in the following posts:

I don't know off-hand if this will work, but running `git filter-branch` with the `--commit-filter` set to simply run `git commit-tree "$@"` every time seems likely to do the trick. (If not, maybe `--env-filter` will do it.) — torek, Feb 23 '14 at 18:33

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 18 '17 at 02:36

The solution to my question came from a friend that asked me to write the answer on his behalf:

Filter the repo, changing the bogus author with the following. Note that this should be on two separate lines (normally using shift+enter):

$ git filter-branch --commit-filter 'case "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" in
> *author\<\ email*) GIT_AUTHOR_NAME=author_name; GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=author_email;; esac; git commit-tree "$@" '

Since the faulty commits are still in the repository, git fsck will still fail on them. To get rid of those commits, clone the repo and then prune unused objects:
```
$ git clone badrepo goodrepo && cd goodrepo
$ git gc --prune=all
```
The new repository is clean. git fsck returns no errors.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 30 '20 at 12:03

You can find a perfectly working example on git-scm.com. As already mentioned by torek, it uses git filter-branch to rewrite all the history affected by your problem.

You will have to change it a bit:

$ git filter-branch --commit-filter '
    if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "name_and_email" ];
    then
            GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="name";
            GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="email";
            git commit-tree "$@";
    else
            git commit-tree "$@";
    fi' HEAD

Not sure whether the $GIT_AUTHOR_NAME will work on the invalid commits, but if it does the above command should do the trick for one author.

If all your commits have the problem, you can skip the if thing and use a regex or something like that to automatically find the border between name and email. That way you can do it completely automatically for all authors.

I already tried that code. It does not catch the "name". Not all the commits in the repo have this problem. — RolPasto, Feb 24 '14 at 19:10

invalid author/committer line - missing space before email

2 Answers2

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