Delete all files from previous commits with git filter-branch

Question

In my project in github I made big mistake , i forgot to add .gitignore in start , and more files were added to my repo. Now I've added .gitignore where are a lot of files and directories. I've done a lot of commits before this and Now I want to delete all unnecessary files from repo with command git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f passwords.txt' HEAD. This command deletes password.txt from all previous commits , but I have two questions: 1) what if I want to delete all files that are in .gitignore? What I must to write after rm?? 2) After input this command , git wrote me: "master branch and 'origin/master' have diverged. Use git pull....". I didn't use this command , I just use git push -u. Explain please what happened with my brancch? Why it is diverged? P.s. I work alone with my project and have only one branch - master

I've had some luck with this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6795435/10023098 — James, Jul 26 '18 at 20:55

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '20 at 17:29

0

If your .gitignore lists only files (not directories or patterns) the command should be
```
rm -f `cat .gitignore`
```
I recommend to copy your .gitignore to a file out of Git tree to avoid Git changing the file while it filters commits. So:
```
cp .gitignore ../gitignore
git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f `cat ../gitignore`'
rm ../gitignore
```
As for the second question — git filter-branch (like any other commit-editing command — amend, rebase, etc.) creates new commits, an entire new branch really, so you you cannot just push filtered branch. You have to force-push it, either with git push -f origin master or git push origin +master.

edited May 23 '20 at 17:29

grg

5,023
3
34
50

answered May 28 '17 at 01:12

phd

82,685
13
120
165

thanks for the answer but I use Visual Studio .Net project and I must to delete also directory , because there are some folders in project – M-Misha-M May 28 '17 at 19:22
rm -rf `cat ../gitignore`. '-r' means 'recursive'. – phd May 28 '17 at 20:09
thanks again , but something wrong.. your command is works but I try to delete all files and directories from previous commits and after your command I get next http://i.imgur.com/wGtYm6g.png. Also I've done a copy of .gitignore with cp command – M-Misha-M May 28 '17 at 23:01
Nothing was changed because ../gitignore was not found. Don't know why, sorry. – phd May 29 '17 at 15:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 10 '18 at 18:36

you should use git filter branch, imagine you want delete all target/ dirs in your previous commits, you can run just 4 commands for that works:

$ git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f */target' HEAD

$ rm -rf */target (you use this one to delete target/ dirs on current HEAD)

$ git commit -am 'delete all target/ dirs' --allow-empty

$ git push

Delete all files from previous commits with git filter-branch

2 Answers2