What’s the fastest way to edit hundreds of Git commit messages?

by

That’s an old question but as there is no mention of git filter-branch, I just add my two cents.

I recently had to mass-replace text in commit message, replacing a block of text by another without changing the rest of the commit messages. For instance, I had to replace Refs: #xxxxx with Refs: #22917.

I used git filter-branch like this

git filter-branch --msg-filter 'sed "s/Refs: #xxxxx/Refs: #22917/g"' master..my_branch
  • I used the option --msg-filter to edit only the commit message but you can use other filters to change files, edit full commit infos, etc.
  • I limited filter-branch by applying it only to the commits that were not in master (master..my_branch) but you can apply it on your whole branch by omitting the range of commits.

As suggested in the doc, try this on a copy of your branch.
Hope that helps.

Sources used for the answer

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I preview stash contents in Git?
  2. Change Git repository directory location.
  3. git clone from another directory
  4. Delete multiple remote branches in git
  5. Color in git-log
  6. How do I stop Git from tracking any changes to a file from this commit forward?
  7. ‘git push heroku master’ is still asking for authentication
  8. Diffing between two entire directories/projects in hg or git?
  9. Git commit to common submodule (master branch)
  10. What are the differences between these git diff commands?
  11. VS Code / Bitbucket / SSH – Permission denied (publickey)
  12. SourceTree App says uncommitted changes even for newly-cloned repository – what could be wrong?
  13. How to set up git over http?
  14. How to keep git from changing file ownership
  15. Calling ‘git pull’ from a git post-update hook
  16. unstaged files gone after git reset –hard
  17. Git remove root commit
  18. Git rebase –preserve-merges fails
  19. Git diff says subproject is dirty
  20. git pull keeping local uncommitted changes
  21. getting “fatal: not a git repository: ‘.'” when using post-update hook to execute ‘git pull’ on another repo
  22. What is git doing when it says it is “resolving deltas”?
  23. Cygwin/Git error cygheap base mismatch detected
  24. How do I show my global Git configuration?
  25. Why does ‘git commit’ not save my changes?
  26. Viewing full version tree in git
  27. How do I write a batch file which opens the GitBash shell and runs a command in the shell?
  28. Is it possible to set a git commit to have a timestamp prior to 1970?
  29. How to make ‘git diff’ ignore comments
  30. Git slows down Emacs to Death – How to Fix this?

Leave a Comment