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Please see this question, and my comment at the bottom of the question.

I have just cloned a repo in a Windows 10 OS which I developed in Linux, and git won't let me check to a branch because elements in it have paths which are illegal in Windows. To work around this I have checked out the branch concerned in WSL.

But what I want to do is delete all elements matching a pattern in all commits in a given branch (or indeed throughout the entire repo). Is there any way to do that?

This is the error I got in W10 (i.e. before going into WSL):

D:\My documents\doc_indexer>git checkout br_2022_01_16 error: invalid path 'D:\temp\logging/doc_indexer/.__rotator_fh.lock' error: invalid path 'D:\temp\logging/doc_indexer/rotator_fh.log.1'

These paths are illegal in Windows not least because they contain a ":". These two files are not showing in WSL as part of the commit on the checked out branch ... and are therefore in older commits in this branch.

How might I weed them out and destroy them? If this is very hard or impossible, is there something else I might do so I can check out this branch in W10 "normal"?

Answers to comment questions

git ls-tree -r br_2022_01_16 : yes, those blobs are listed there...

git rev-parse --show-toplevel : this shows the root directory, i.e. the one containing dir ".git".

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  • Do they show up if you run git ls-tree -r br_2022_01_16? Commented Jan 28, 2022 at 21:20
  • where is the root of your repository located ? git rev-parse --show-toplevel Commented Jan 28, 2022 at 21:34
  • see answers. does their presence in the ls-tree command mean something about their deletability? Commented Jan 29, 2022 at 17:02

1 Answer 1

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You can use git filter-branch to delete files from all commits. This operation can be destructive, it is a good idea to make a backup of your repo before running it.

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch files to delete' --all

There's also git filter-repo which is a newer alternative to filter-branch:

git filter-repo --path files --path to --path delete --invert-paths

Depending on your exact use case, --path-regex, --path-glob, or --paths-from-file might give you better user experience.

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