CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgit-bashgit-filter-branch
BDD
BDD

Reputation: 35

What is causing fatal: bad revision and how can I fix this git command?

I need to completely remove a folder and all of its files from the history of a git repository and I need to ignore any future changes to that folder.

Using Git-Bash, I have already tried a filter-branch command with a git remove command nested within it. Below is my command.

git filter-branch --force --index-filter \ "git rm -rf --cached --ignore- unmatch C:\Foldername" \--prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

I expected the folder to be removed from all versions of the repository, but I received an error message instead:

fatal: bad revision 'git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch C:\Foldername'

I then tried the command: git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch "C:\Foldername" which worked by itself. However this does not accomplish the task of removing the folder from the entire history of the repository.

Update: I just ran the command removing the space before "git. As shown below.

git filter-branch --force --index-filter \ "git rm -rf --cached --ignore- unmatch C:\Foldername" \--prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

I now get this message:

fatal: C:Foldername: 'C:Foldername' is outside repository index filter failed: git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch C:\Foldername rm: cannot remove 'C:/.git-rewrite': Directory not empty

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4399

Answers (1)

torek
torek

Reputation: 487755

You have a lot of weirdly placed backslashes, as if you used cut-and-paste on what was originally a multi-line command example like this:

echo I \
am a \
multi-line \
example

but turned it into a single line without removing the backslashes:

echo I \ am a \ multi-line \ example

Try running both—one with the newlines, so that each backslash is the very last character of an actual complete line, and one without—and compare the output:

$ echo I \
> am a \
> multi-line \
> example
I am a multi-line example
$ echo I \ am a \ multi-line \ example
I  am a  multi-line  example

Can you see the difference between the two outputs? It has to do with white space, and is hard to tell sometimes. I have a second trick I like to use, based on the fact that the wc command prints its arguments in error messages, one per line:

$ wc I \ am a \ multi-line \ example
wc: I: No such file or directory
wc: ' am': No such file or directory
wc: a: No such file or directory
wc: ' multi-line': No such file or directory
wc: ' example': No such file or directory
0 0 0 total

Note that the files wc tried to open were named I, ' am'—a file name with a leading space—and so on.

In this case, git filter-branch thought that the --index-filter it should use was , which is a command that won't do much (but is actually valid here). Then the next thing after that was a commit-selector, but it did not work as a commit-selector. That's where your error came from.

In this case, since you're not using multiple lines, you should just remove all the backslashes. That will give you a different problem, because git rm -rf --cached should be given the relative file names, not a full path name.

Upvotes: 1

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