How to change the author and committer name and e-mail of multiple commits in Git?

Posted By: Anonymous

I was writing a simple script in the school computer, and committing the changes to Git (in a repo that was in my pendrive, cloned from my computer at home). After several commits I realized I was committing stuff as the root user.

Is there any way to change the author of these commits to my name?

Solution

This answer uses git-filter-branch, for which the docs now give this warning:

git filter-branch has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance). These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and as such, its use is not recommended. Please use an alternative history filtering tool such as git filter-repo. If you still need to use git filter-branch, please carefully read SAFETY (and PERFORMANCE) to learn about the land mines of filter-branch, and then vigilantly avoid as many of the hazards listed there as reasonably possible.

Changing the author (or committer) would require re-writing all of the history. If you’re okay with that and think it’s worth it then you should check out git filter-branch. The man page includes several examples to get you started. Also note that you can use environment variables to change the name of the author, committer, dates, etc. — see the "Environment Variables" section of the git man page.

Specifically, you can fix all the wrong author names and emails for all branches and tags with this command (source: GitHub help):

#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="[email protected]"
CORRECT_NAME="Your Correct Name"
CORRECT_EMAIL="[email protected]"
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

Answered By: Anonymous

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