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amalmurali47 / edit_commit_history.md
Last active June 1, 2024 13:12
Change ownership of selected older commits in Git
  1. Clone the repo.
  2. Use git rebase -i --root
  3. vim will open. Select the commits you want to modify by changing pick to edit. If you would like to change all the commits, perform the following replace: :%s/^pick/edit/g. This command changes all instances of "pick" at the start of lines to "edit".
  4. You will now be shown all the selected commits one by one. Each commit message will be displayed. You have two options:
    • If you would like to keep the commit author details the same, do a git rebase --continue.
    • If you would like to change it to a different name/email, do git commit --amend --reset-author. If --reset-author is specified, it will use the details from your git config. (If you need to specify an alternate name/email, you can do so with --author="John Doe <john@example.com>". If you would like to change the time to a previous date, you can do so with --date "2 days ago".)
  5. Do the same for all the commits and finish the rebase.
  6. Perform git push -f origin master to