Question

I have looked at several threads addressing this.

Combining multiple git repositories

Combining multiple git repositories having a space in their name

I also looked at the git filter-branch manpage.

---

update

I have changed to a 2 script system:

#!/bin/bash
git filter-branch --index-filter '~/doit.sh' HEAD

and doit.sh

#!/bin/bash
git ls-files -s | \ 
    sed "s-\t-&data/perl_modules/-" | \ 
    GIT_INDEX_FILE="$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" git update-index --index-info && \
    mv "$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" "$GIT_INDEX_FILE"

This avoids the previous error, but now gets this (replaced path with […]):

Rewrite c35e4ef0626fb2045f57fa5b605e7663b8d06196 (1/10977)mv: cannot stat `[...]/.git-rewrite/t/../index.new': No such file or directory
index filter failed: ~/doit.sh

When I run the

ls-files- s | sed ... | git update-index ...

I get the index file it should generate. As well when I change the doit.sh file to output the result of sed instead of piping it to git update-index it appears to produce the proper output… it seems git update-index is simply not creating the file when run under –index-filter….

---

Update again:

When I change

mv “$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new” “$GIT_INDEX_FILE”

to

mv “$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new” “$GIT_INDEX_FILE” || true

It fails the first mv, but all the others (so far) are working.

---

All of this culminated in this script:

git filter-branch --index-filter \
    'git ls-files -s | sed "s-\t\"*-&data/perl_modules/-" |
            GIT_INDEX_FILE=$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new \
                    git update-index --index-info &&
     mv $GIT_INDEX_FILE.new $GIT_INDEX_FILE' HEAD

Theoretically this script should take all the files in the repository, shove them into data/perl_modules/, and rewrite history so that it appears the files have always been in that directory.

However I get this error:

fatal: ambiguous argument 'ls-files': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions

Not sure how to proceed, I don’t understand the script well enough to debug it, and it is taken directly from the git filter-branch manpage.

I have tried this both before and after manually moving the files to the subdir in case it required they be moved, or required they not be moved.

Answer 1

There were a couple problems.

1) git filter-branch –index filter was not using the ‘…’ properly.

I am not sure why this is, a bug with git-filter, an environment problem? who knows. But I was able to fix it by moving everything out of the ‘…’ and putting it into a script file. I then called the script inside the ”

git filter-branch --index-filter '~/doit.sh' HEAD

And doit.sh:

#!/bin/bash

git ls-files -s | \ 
    sed "s-\t-&data/perl_modules/-" | \ 
    GIT_INDEX_FILE="$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" git update-index --index-info

mv "$GIT_INDEX_FILE.new" "$GIT_INDEX_FILE" || true

2) The first commit was empty, so there was no index.new to mv

This git repo was imported from svn using git-svn. As such the first commit was completely empty simply saying initial svn repo initialization. As such there were no files moved, and no index.new to move. This was solved by adding || true to the mv command. Note however that if more than one mv command fails you have other problems.