I started this question on #git last week, but this is getting long, and things have changed some, so I'm going to try here. I had a 3rd party jar file checked in to our git repository. It was about 4 mb, so no big deal. Then about 17 months ago somebody checked in a 550 mb version. There were several versions of the original file in several different directories. The large version replaced the small version in some of those directories (but not all of them). Then somebody found a "small" version that was only 110 mb and replaced some of the 550 mb files and some of the old 4 mb files. Finally several months after that we got the correct updated 5 mb latest version. But I'm still carrying around an extra 660 mb in my object database, and we are adding developers and moving to an off-site location with lower bandwidth and higher latency, so I would like to clean this up. My first attempt just removed the blob (by hash ID). It's been over a year since the small correct file was checked in, so the odds of ever needing to build anything that old are very slim. But after thinking about it some, I came up with this to replace the blob with the correct one and wanted to see if this is a reasonable way to do this before I actually backup and then replace my central git repository. git filter-branch --index-filter 'killem=$(git ls-files --stage | grep 7a36af54a6c47\\\|abe809091bcb3 ) ; if [ -n "$killem" ] ; then git ls-files --stage |grep 7a36af54a6c47\\\|abe809091bcb3 | sed -f /home/blr/tmp/chgblob.sed | git update-index --index-info ; fi' chgblob.sed looks like this: s/7a36af54a6c47a29eb9690caefa132489d39c4d0/8924ef0f78b3d09957a8697ca93cce6700771071/g s/abe809091bcb37a06284f8353366074622d72373/8924ef0f78b3d09957a8697ca93cce6700771071/g 7a36af is the 550 mb blob, abe80909 is the 110 mb, and 8924ef0f is the 5 mb new version. This isn't extremely efficient since it does the 'git ls-filess --stage' twice (once to see if the blob is used, then again to change it ONLY if the blob is referenced in the current index). But that only adds a few seconds to the 28 minute runtime, so I'm not too worried about that. And yes, I could just check for the return value of grep, but I did echo $killem while I was debugging and that was useful, so I just left it like that. Does this look like a reasonable way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, or am I doing something that's going to cause grief later? Thanks, Barry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html