How to change the author and committer name and e-mail of multiple commits in Git?

Question

I was writing a simple script in the school computer, and committing the changes to Git (in a repo that was in my pendrive, cloned from my computer at home). After several c

Answer 1

This is a more elaborated version of @Brian's version:

To change the author and committer, you can do this (with linebreaks in the string which is possible in bash):

git filter-branch --env-filter '
    if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "" ];
    then
        GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="";
        GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="";
        GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="";
        GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="";
    fi' -- --all

You might get one of these errors:

1. The temporary directory exists already
2. Refs starting with refs/original exists already
   (this means another filter-branch has been run previously on the repository and the then original branch reference is backed up at refs/original)

If you want to force the run in spite of these errors, add the --force flag:

git filter-branch --force --env-filter '
    if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "" ];
    then
        GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="";
        GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="";
        GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="";
        GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="";
    fi' -- --all

A little explanation of the -- --all option might be needed: It makes the filter-branch work on all revisions on all refs (which includes all branches). This means, for example, that tags are also rewritten and is visible on the rewritten branches.

A common "mistake" is to use HEAD instead, which means filtering all revisions on just the current branch. And then no tags (or other refs) would exist in the rewritten branch.