substitution - How to substitute text from files in git history?

Question

I've always used an interface based git client (smartGit) and thus don't have much experience with the git console.

However, I now face the need to substitute a string in all .txt files from history (so, not erasing the whole file but just substituting a string). I found the following command:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'git ls-files -z "*.php" |xargs -0 perl -p -i -e "s#(PASSWORD1|PASSWORD2|PASSWORD3)#xXxXxXxXxXx#g"' -- --all

I tried this, and unfortunately noticed that while the password did get changed, all binary files got corrupted. Images, etc. would all be corrupted.

Is there a better way to do this that won't corrupt my binary files?

Thanks.

EDIT:

I got mixed up with something. The actual code that caused binary files to get corrupted was:

$ git filter-branch --tree-filter "find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/originalpassword/newpassword/g' {} ;"

The code at the top actually removed all files with my password strangely enough.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4110652/how-to-substitute-text-from-files-in-git-history

Answer 1

You can avoid touching undesired files by passing -name "pattern" to find.

This works for me:

git filter-branch --tree-filter "find . -name '*.php' -exec sed -i -e 
    's/originalpassword/newpassword/g' {} ;"