[is this the right place to ask questions about git usage? or is there a different forum where one can submit possibly embarrassingly silly questions?] i've been perusing "git filter-branch", and i'm curious if i have the right idea about how to very selectively get rid of some useless history. say, early on, one commits a sizable directory of content, call it /mydir. that directory sits there for a while until it becomes obvious it's out of date and worthless and should never have been committed. the obvious solution would seem to be: $ git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -rf /mydir' HEAD correct? however, say one version of that directory was committed early on, then later tossed for being useless with "git rm", and subsequently replaced by newer content under exactly the same name. now i'd like to go back and delete the history related to that early version of /mydir, but not the second. obviously, i can't use the above command as it would delete both versions. so it appears the solution would be a trivial application of the "--commit-filter" option: git filter-branch --commit-filter ' if [ "$GIT_COMMIT" = "<commit-id>" ] ; then skip_commit "$@"; else git commit-tree "$@"; fi' HEAD where <commit-id> is the commit that introduced the first verrsion of /mydir. do i have that right? is there a simpler way to do this? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================