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| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt | 17 |
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt index 7ffe03f427..237f85e767 100644 --- a/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt +++ b/Documentation/git-filter-branch.txt @@ -91,7 +91,9 @@ OPTIONS --index-filter <command>:: This is the filter for rewriting the index. It is similar to the tree filter but does not check out the tree, which makes it much - faster. For hairy cases, see linkgit:git-update-index[1]. + faster. Frequently used with `git rm \--cached + \--ignore-unmatch ...`, see EXAMPLES below. For hairy + cases, see linkgit:git-update-index[1]. --parent-filter <command>:: This is the filter for rewriting the commit's parent list. @@ -204,19 +206,18 @@ However, if the file is absent from the tree of some commit, a simple `rm filename` will fail for that tree and commit. Thus you may instead want to use `rm -f filename` as the script. -A significantly faster version: +Using `\--index-filter` with 'git-rm' yields a significantly faster +version. Like with using `rm filename`, `git rm --cached filename` +will fail if the file is absent from the tree of a commit. If you +want to "completely forget" a file, it does not matter when it entered +history, so we also add `\--ignore-unmatch`: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached filename' HEAD +git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch filename' HEAD -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, you will get the rewritten history saved in HEAD. -As with using `rm filename`, `git rm --cached filename` will fail -if the file is absent from the tree of a commit. If it is not important -whether the file is already absent from the tree, you can use -`git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch filename` instead. - To rewrite the repository to look as if `foodir/` had been its project root, and discard all other history: |