git: change one line in file for the complete history

Here's a command that will remove an offending line from a file's history in all your branches:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'sed -i "/sensitive information/ d" filename' -- --all

This checks out every revision, runs the sed command on it, then commits that revision back.

The sed command in this case matches any lines containing the pattern sensitive information in the file named filename and deletes those lines.

Note: it's good if you have a backup, and try the sed script on its own first to make sure it's doing what you want, because it can take quite a while to run on a long history.

I made this command that doesn't error out when a file doesn't exist:

 filename=./path/to/your/filename filter=your_regex_here git filter-branch --tree-filter 'test -f $filename && sed -i.bak "/$filter/d" $filename  || echo “skipping file“' -- --all

My answer combines the best of everything. It replaces the just the given filter string instead of the whole line and it nicely skips if the file is not found in a commit. There are a lot of escaped quotes but the other answer had really weird quotes that didn't work for me.

 git filter-branch --tree-filter "test -f \"$filename\" && sed -i \"s/$filter//g\" \"$filename\" || echo \"skipping $filename\"" -- --all