Error, fatal ambiguous argument

[vesche]

I am trying to change the commit times on one of my projects. I merged a pull request from someone with a bad system time... git-redate doesn't seem to have a problem when editing a date from the last 5 commits. But, I'm trying to change some commits that are within the last 23 commits. I'm getting the following error (upon exiting vi):

$ git-redate -c 23
fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD~23..HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
Git redate failed. Please make sure you run this on a clean working directory.

[callaginn]

I'm getting the exact same error. I even added the two gitblah files to my global gitignore and checked the status of the repo before and during the git redate command.

@vesche Did you ever find an alternative way of doing this?

PCNAME:~ User$ cd /Sites/test
PCNAME:test User$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean
PCNAME:test User$ git redate -c 12
fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD~12..HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
Git redate failed. Please make sure you run this on a clean working directory.

[vesche]

@callaginn Yes, I did. I had to change each commit manually, luckily I only had two bad commits.

Here's the stack overflow answer that helped me, I had to modify the answer a bit because it was for unpublished commits. Make sure you force the push.

And here's the personal note I took afterwards:

Change the time of a git commit

God this was a bitch, writing this down in case I need it again.

$ git filter-branch --env-filter \
"if test \$GIT_COMMIT = '448827e9ef01bb245ccd3939bfbddc2681c6d9c8'
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE='Sun May 7 02:23:03 2017 +0000'
    export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE='Sun May 7 02:23:03 2017 +0000'
fi" && rm -fr "$(git rev-parse --git-dir)/refs/original/"

$ git push -f origin master

Check out git log --since="3 months ago" to verify the changes.

[callaginn]

@vesche Haha...that does look irritating. I ended up finding it easier to just do it again, though, since I had already carefully documented all my backdated commits in a spreadsheet. Spent my entire last weekend on that stupid project : P

Git is complicated. Really don't understand why nobody's really created a visual interface for all this. Closest I've seen is GitUp, but it's lacking a ton of features: https://github.com/git-up/GitUp

[vesche]

@callaginn

Check out Github Desktop: https://desktop.github.com/

[callaginn]

@vesche Already using it. What I'm talking about is a git editor that allows you to do filter-branching, interactive-rebasing, tons of redos, etc in a visual drag-and-drop interface. Would do it myself...but I'm a front-end designer/developer, not a programmer.

I have found that the Atom editor can do some simple rewrites, though, if you haven't pushed anything yet. Otherwise, you're stuck with the command line.

[ghost]

This happens when you go through or beyond the root commit.

Not sure how much finagling is required to accommodate the edge case.

[vesche]

@au That makes a lot of sense, I didn't even think about that. It was also my case that the author I merged commits from did so on a date before the root commit.