git-filter-branch to remove strings, but where strings contain $ ' \ and other characters

Question

I\'m trying to rewrite history, using:

git filter-branch --tree-filter \'git ls-files -z \"*.php\" |xargs -0 perl -p -i -e \"s#(PASSWORD1|PASSWORD2|PASSWORD3)#

Answer 1

Building on the brilliant help given by konsolebox which really helped me solve this, the solution I ended up using in terms of doing it via the shell was:

Define the strings in a file, strings.txt

string1
another$string
yet! @nother string
some more stuff to re\move

Create a Perl script perl-escape-strings.pl which will be used to escape the strings, where xXxXxXxXxXx is the string they will all be replaced with

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>)
{
        chomp;
        my $passwd = quotemeta($_);
        print qq|s/$passwd/xXxXxXxXxXx/g;\n|;
}

exit 0;

Bash script:

# Pre-process the strings
./perl-escape-strings.pl strings.txt > strings-perl-escaped.txt

# Change directory to the repo
cd repo/

# Define the filter command
FILTER="git ls-files -z '*.html' '*.php' | xargs -0 perl -p -i ../strings-perl-escaped.txt"

# Run the filter
git filter-branch --tree-filter "$FILTER" -- --all

However, because the number of strings is large, and my repository is large and with many thousand commits, the filter-branch method is taking a long time. So I'm going to try The BFG mentioned in another answer also in parallel, to see if it completes quicker.