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I have a project under git. One day I moved all project files from current directory to foo/bar/ under the project. I did it using git mv. Then I added some more files and did some changes to already existing files.

As a result, now when I look at the history of foo/bar/file.c, I can only see changes that I did after I moved the file.

I tried to fix this in various ways (filter-branch with subdirectory filter, etc), but nothing helped, so I am pretty stacked here. I'll appreciate any help that you can give me. Thanks!

Alex R
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Alexander Sandler
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3 Answers3

102

To rewrite the history with the files moved:

If you want the project's history to look as though all files have always been in the directory foo/bar, then you need to do a little surgery. Use git filter-branch with the "tree filter" to rewrite the commits so that anywhere foo/bar doesn't exist, it is created and all files are moved to it:

git filter-branch --prune-empty --tree-filter '
if [ ! -e foo/bar ]; then
    mkdir -p foo/bar
    git ls-tree --name-only $GIT_COMMIT | xargs -I files mv files foo/bar
fi'

Now the history will be recorded as if all files were always located in foo/bar.

To see the history of a moved file:

If you just want to see the history of a file that has been moved or renamed at some point in the past, then simply use the --follow option to git log:

git log --follow foo/bar/file.c
Borek Bernard
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Dan Moulding
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    @Alexander: You may want to try putting the one-liner (everything in the single quotes) in an actual script, with a bash shebang line. I think `filter-branch` is probably trying to run this in `sh`, not `bash`. – Cascabel Oct 28 '10 at 14:51
  • I made some progress. It seems that double brackets in if statement were causing this error. Single brackets work better, it still doesn't work though. The problem is that before I moved everything to foo/bar/ I had directory named foo with some content in the project. So now it complains "cannot move `foo' to a subdirectory of itself, `foo/bar/foo'". – Alexander Sandler Oct 28 '10 at 15:05
  • @Alexander: You'll just need to adjust the script accordingly. Something like: `if [[ ! -e foo/bar ]]; then mkdir -p foo/bar; git ls-tree --name-only $GIT_COMMIT | grep -v ^foo$ | xargs -I files mv files foo/bar; fi` That uses grep to filter out `foo` from the list of files to be moved. Note that I'm also assuming that the `bar` subdirectory never existed until you moved everything under it. If that isn't the case, then you'll need to account for that in the script as well. – Dan Moulding Oct 28 '10 at 17:31
  • This works great except for the case when the repo originally contains submodules. The submodule path won't be updated. I'm assuming I can just remove the submodule and re-add it under the new path and add a commit, but that's not quite as elegant. Anything my Googling missed? – Brian J. Miller Feb 07 '14 at 05:10
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    Using `[[` caused a problem for me, as there is no such command (it is a shell bulitin), using `[` and `]` solves the problem. – aularon Apr 22 '14 at 13:06
  • This seems to work, however, file that are deleted stick around in the rewritten repository. – deadalnix Apr 06 '15 at 05:49
  • Can this easily be undone if you are unhappy with the results after doing it on a large repo? – TTT Jan 09 '19 at 21:33
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    @TTT yes, it can be easily undone. `git filter-branch` will keep copies of the original branches under refs/original. So while on branch foo, you can do something like `git reset --hard original/foo` to put things back the way they were. – Dan Moulding Jan 19 '19 at 04:48
7

To wrap things up here's a short summary of what I did. The command that worked for me was:

if [ ! -e foo/bar ]; then mkdir -p foo/bar; git ls-tree --name-only $GIT_COMMIT | grep -v ^foo$ | xargs -I files mv files foo/bar || echo ""; fi

The echo command that I added at the end ensured that even when mv fails entire command will continue running. It didn't move contents of foo/bar/foo, but I can live with that.

Thanks a lot to Dan Moulding (!!!) and Jefromi for the help.

Community
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Alexander Sandler
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2

Install git-filter-repo:

git clone https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo/

Add the git-filter-repo executable to your $PATH (see INSTALL.MD for other options):

# this is just an example, you probably want to edit bashrc,
# or add a symlink to ~/bin or /usr/local/bin
PATH=$PATH:${PWD}/git-filter-repo

Now cd to the git repo that you want to modify, and run:

git filter-repo --to-subdirectory-filter foo/bar
bain
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