From: Yi, EungJun <semtlenori@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2012 16:28:31 GMT
Subject: Remove all files except a few files, using filter-branch
Message-ID: <CAFT+Tg_ipyPgNQxx8XsXySzmA3YM3mKe1gB5GyTNqN++gdphnQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, all.

I want to remove all files except a few files, in the history of my
git repository.

I tried to do that as follows:

    git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch
$(git ls-files | grep -v '^filename$' | tr '\n' ' ')"

But this does not work well if there is a file whose name is not
encoded in us-ascii or includes parenthesis. git-filter-branch is
great to remove some files in my repository, but not good enough to
remove all except only a few.

Does anyone know the better way?