How to avoid deleting files with same name?

[loveencounterflow]

Ideally I would want to precisely specify the path of a given file to delete. If the file to be deleted is not the only one in its folder and there is a namesake file somewhere else in the project, then the history of both files will be gone after bfg --delete-files xy.zzz. Renaming the other file before running bfg will keep the other file, but also erase its history.

Running The BFG has been great so far but I wonder why the simplest of use cases isn't covered. Shouldn't it be trivial given that globs against filenames do work?

[rosasurfer]

Not only it happily deletes all your files of the given name but additionally I can't manage to get a log or report of the files BFG deleted this way. The file in the report folder is useless to me as it shows the file name as entered, something I already know. I can't find a way to show which files have been deleted.
Also I miss a dry-run-mode which shows the file going to be touched before. I'm surprised, too, this is not covered.

I tried BFG but because of these issues I had to back to the much more complicated git filter-branch.

[javabrett]

This is a long-standing feature-request, see #79, #12 .

The lack of this feature is brought-about by the way BFG processes trees - it only looks at the filename within the tree it is processing, so the context provided by all parent trees to the root (i.e. the full file-path) is not considered. From memory, with some moderate amount of effort, this might be added. There would be some memory and/or execution-time performance costs for this. Someone might even contribute a patch for this?

The alternative often used is to pre-parse the entire object database and get the blob IDs of blobs to be removed - that way you can select them by full paths. BFG then supports removal by blob ID, so you can remove very specific paths that way.

[thomassajot]

Git-filter-repo is able to remove file given a path from the repo's root. It is recommended in git's own documentation on git-filter-branch.