How do you fix a bad merge, and replay your good commits onto a fixed merge?

Question

I accidentally committed an unwanted file (filename.orig while resolving a merge) to my repository several commits ago, without me noticing it until now. I want

Answer 1

Rewriting Git history demands changing all the affected commit ids, and so everyone who's working on the project will need to delete their old copies of the repo, and do a fresh clone after you've cleaned the history. The more people it inconveniences, the more you need a good reason to do it - your superfluous file isn't really causing a problem, but if only you are working on the project, you might as well clean up the Git history if you want to!

To make it as easy as possible, I'd recommend using the BFG Repo-Cleaner, a simpler, faster alternative to git-filter-branch specifically designed for removing files from Git history. One way in which it makes your life easier here is that it actually handles all refs by default (all tags, branches, etc) but it's also 10 - 50x faster.

You should carefully follow the steps here: http://rtyley.github.com/bfg-repo-cleaner/#usage - but the core bit is just this: download the BFG jar (requires Java 6 or above) and run this command:

$ java -jar bfg.jar --delete-files filename.orig my-repo.git

Your entire repository history will be scanned, and any file named filename.orig (that's not in your latest commit) will be removed. This is considerably easier than using git-filter-branch to do the same thing!

Full disclosure: I'm the author of the BFG Repo-Cleaner.