Remove all files except a few files, using filter-branch

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?

"Yi, EungJun" <semtlenori@gmail.com> writes:

Try instead first removing all files, then restoring the files you want to keep.

--index-filter "git rm --cached -qr -- . && git reset -q -- filename"

Andreas.

Hmm... I tried as you said, but it seems to lose history.

In the below example, after rewriting there must be two commits for 'b' file but only one exists.

~$ git init filter-branch2
Initialized empty Git repository in
/home/nori/mysrc/test/git/filter-branch2/.git/
~/filter-branch2$ cd filter-branch2
~/filter-branch2$ echo 1 > a
~/filter-branch2$ echo 1 > b
~/filter-branch2$ git add a b
~/filter-branch2$ git commit -m 'first'
[master (root-commit) ae2b5fd] first
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 a
 create mode 100644 b
~/filter-branch2$ echo 2 >> b
~/filter-branch2$ git add b
~/filter-branch2$ git commit -m 'second'
[master a32b84e] second
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
~/filter-branch2$ git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm --cached
-qr -- . && git reset -q -- b"
Rewrite a32b84ed7cec5686e43a47195dfa8114f83619f3 (2/2)
Ref 'refs/heads/master' was rewritten
~/filter-branch2$ git log -- b
commit 19611f9eaf412232e237afcc059d0324a862062f
Author: Yi EungJun <semtlenori@gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Sep 18 23:51:53 2012 +0900

    first

Am I doing something wrong?

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:06 AM, Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

Am 9/18/2012 17:01, schrieb Yi, EungJun:

I think it should be '... && git reset -q $GIT_COMMIT -- filename'

-- Hannes

It works! Thanks to Hannes and Andreas!

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 12:10 AM, Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net> wrote: