Remove a directory from all previous commits

Question

Git Repo, there is a folder ABC with three files, all having spaces in the name file - 1.ext, file - 2.ext, and file - 3.ext.

Answer 1

Say you begin with a history of

$ git lola --name-status
* e709131 (HEAD, master) bar
| A     bar
* 61493ac ABC/file - 3.ext
| A     ABC/file - 3.ext
* 34cce9e ABC/file - 2.ext
| A     ABC/file - 2.ext
* 115e6d5 ABC/file - 1.ext
| A     ABC/file - 1.ext
* 5ea5b42 foo
  A     foo

Note: git lola is a non-standard but highly useful alias.

git rm supports an option for removing subtrees.

-r
Allow recursive removal when a leading directory name is given.

After running

$ git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached -r --ignore-unmatch ABC' \
  --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

you will see output that resembles

Rewrite 115e6d5cd06565ca08f1e5c98c4b91246cf59fa1 (2/5)rm 'ABC/file - 1.ext'
Rewrite 34cce9e90f832460137e620ebacc8a73a99e64ce (3/5)rm 'ABC/file - 1.ext'
rm 'ABC/file - 2.ext'
Rewrite 61493ac3211808f34f616dbc33d51d193b3f45a3 (4/5)rm 'ABC/file - 1.ext'
rm 'ABC/file - 2.ext'
rm 'ABC/file - 3.ext'
Rewrite e709131f1fe6103adf37616c9fa500994aeb30d0 (5/5)rm 'ABC/file - 1.ext'
rm 'ABC/file - 2.ext'
rm 'ABC/file - 3.ext'

Ref 'refs/heads/master' was rewritten

If you are happy with the result, delete the old master with

$ git update-ref -d refs/original/refs/heads/master

and now you have a history of

$ git lola --name-status
* 19680d4 (HEAD, master) bar
| A     bar
* 5ea5b42 foo
  A     foo

To answer your second question, say you wanted to delete ABC/file - 2.ext only. Remember that you will need two layers of quoting: one layer for the whole command and another to escape spaces in an argument to that command, the name of the file to remove.

One way to do that is

$ git filter-branch --index-filter \
  'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch "ABC/file - 2.ext"' --prune-empty \
  --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

Note the double quotes inside the single quotes.

If you had run this command instead, your history would have become

$ git lola
* a8d1b0d (HEAD, master) bar
* cff0c4e ABC/file - 3.ext
* 115e6d5 ABC/file - 1.ext
* 5ea5b42 foo