How can one change the timestamp of an old commit in Git?

Question

The answers to How to modify existing, unpushed commits? describe a way to amend previous commit messages that haven\'t yet been pushed upstream. The new messages inherit t

Answer 1

You can do an interactive rebase and choose edit for the commit whose date you would like to alter. When the rebase process stops for amending the commit you type in for instance:

git commit --amend --date="Wed Feb 16 14:00 2011 +0100"

Afterwards you continue your interactive rebase.

UPDATE (in response to the comment of studgeek): to change the commit date instead of the author date:

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Wed Feb 16 14:00 2011 +0100" git commit --amend

The lines above set an environment variable GIT_COMMITTER_DATE which is used in amend commit.

Everything is tested in Git Bash.