Change old commit message on Git

Question

I was trying to edit an old commit message as explained here.

The thing is that now, when I try to run rebase -i HEAD~5 it says interactive rebas

Answer 1

It says:

When you save and exit the editor, it will rewind you back to that last commit in that list and drop you on the command line with the following message:

$ git rebase -i HEAD~3
Stopped at 7482e0d... updated the gemspec to hopefully work better
You can amend the commit now, with

It does not mean:

type again git rebase -i HEAD~3

Try to not typing git rebase -i HEAD~3 when exiting the editor, and it should work fine.
(otherwise, in your particular situation, a git rebase -i --abort might be needed to reset everything and allow you to try again)

---

As Dave Vogt mentions in the comments, git rebase --continue is for going to the next task in the rebasing process, after you've amended the first commit.

Also, Gregg Lind mentions in his answer the reword command of git rebase:

By replacing the command "pick" with the command "edit", you can tell git rebase to stop after applying that commit, so that you can edit the files and/or the commit message, amend the commit, and continue rebasing.

If you just want to edit the commit message for a commit, replace the command "pick" with the command "reword", since Git1.6.6 (January 2010).

It does the same thing ‘edit’ does during an interactive rebase, except it only lets you edit the commit message without returning control to the shell. This is extremely useful.
Currently if you want to clean up your commit messages you have to:

$ git rebase -i next

Then set all the commits to ‘edit’. Then on each one:

# Change the message in your editor.
$ git commit --amend
$ git rebase --continue

Using ‘reword’ instead of ‘edit’ lets you skip the git-commit and git-rebase calls.

Answer 2

As Gregg Lind suggested, you can use reword to be prompted to only change the commit message (and leave the commit intact otherwise):

git rebase -i HEAD~n

Here, n is the list of last n commits.

For example, if you use git rebase -i HEAD~4, you may see something like this:

pick e459d80 Do xyz
pick 0459045 Do something
pick 90fdeab Do something else
pick facecaf Do abc

Now replace pick with reword for the commits you want to edit the messages of:

pick e459d80 Do xyz
reword 0459045 Do something
reword 90fdeab Do something else
pick facecaf Do abc

Exit the editor after saving the file, and next you will be prompted to edit the messages for the commits you had marked reword, in one file per message. Note that it would've been much simpler to just edit the commit messages when you replaced pick with reword, but doing that has no effect.

Learn more on GitHub's page for Changing a commit message.

Answer 3

Just wanted to provide a different option for this. In my case, I usually work on my individual branches then merge to master, and the individual commits I do to my local are not that important.

Due to a git hook that checks for the appropriate ticket number on Jira but was case sensitive, I was prevented from pushing my code. Also, the commit was done long ago and I didn't want to count how many commits to go back on the rebase.

So what I did was to create a new branch from latest master and squash all commits from problem branch into a single commit on new branch. It was easier for me and I think it's good idea to have it here as future reference.

From latest master:

git checkout -b new-branch

Then

git merge --squash problem-branch
git commit -m "new message" 

Referece: https://github.com/rotati/wiki/wiki/Git:-Combine-all-messy-commits-into-one-commit-before-merging-to-Master-branch

Answer 4

Here's a very nice Gist that covers all the possible cases: https://gist.github.com/nepsilon/156387acf9e1e72d48fa35c4fabef0b4

Overview:

git rebase -i HEAD~X
# X is the number of commits to go back
# Move to the line of your commit, change pick into edit,
# then change your commit message:
git commit --amend
# Finish the rebase with:
git rebase --continue

Answer 5

FWIW, git rebase interactive now has a "reword" option, which makes this much less painful!