Re: Really remove a file ?

["Stefan Karpinski" <stefan.karpinski@gmail.com>]

Specifically, you probably want to do something like this:

  $ git filter-branch --index-filter 'git update-index --remove
<filename>' --force -- --all

Beware that this will make your repository effectively "incompatible"
with those of others who've pulled from you before—because all of your
history is now completely rewritten. You should probably have them
clone a new copy from the repo you've run this on instead of trying to
continue working with their old repos. Otherwise all hell breaks
loose. You'll probably also want to run "git gc" on your repo to
actually get rid of the huge object that was added (or does
filter-branch do this automatically?).

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2008/10/9  <marcreddist@aim.com>:
> > So is there a way to really remove a file in the git repository so that it
> > never existed (I mean not having the diff in the logs and the data stored
> > somewhere in the .git directory) ? Or if it's not the was git is supposed to
> > be used, is there a way to hide the diff (even from git-log) or something ?
>
> Yes. But you'll change the whole history (of course, it should _never_
> mention the file).
> See git filter-branch (there is even an example at the end of its man page.
> Replace mv with rm)
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