Question

I have a git repository in a directory called project:

[~/project]$ ls
a  b  c

I want to move everything into a subdirectory of the project directory, so it look like this:

[~/project]$ ls
subdir
[~/project]$ cd subdir
[~/project/subdir]$ ls
a  b  c

Normally a git mv would work, but I want to make it look as if the historical commits had always been made to that subdirectory from the beginning. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Looks like filter-branch does what I want:

git filter-branch --tree-filter \
        'mkdir subdir; \
        find -maxdepth 1 \
            -not -name . \
            -not -name .git \
            -not -name subdir \
            -print0 \
        | xargs -0 -I{} mv {} subdir' \
    -d /tmp/whatever -- --all

The -d /tmp/whatever part is just so it runs the commands on a tmpfs filesystem so there isn’t a bunch of disk IO.

(In rare cases, /tmp won’t be mounted as tmpfs. You can check with mount | grep tmp.)