#Git interactive rebase

Many times, when working with Git, you may want to revise your local commit history. One of the great things about Git is that it allows you to make decisions at the last possible moment. You can decide what files go into which commits right before you commit with the staging area, you can decide that you didn’t mean to be working on something yet with git stash, and you can rewrite commits that already happened so they look like they happened in a different way. This can involve changing the order of the commits, changing messages or modifying files in a commit, squashing together or splitting apart commits, or removing commits entirely — all before you share your work with others.

In this section, you’ll see how to accomplish these tasks so that you can make your commit history look the way you want before you share it with others.

Changing your most recent commit is probably the most common rewriting of history that you’ll do. You’ll often want to do two basic things to your last commit: simply change the commit message, or change the actual content of the commit by adding, removing and modifying files.

#Changing Multiple Commit Messages

To modify a commit that is farther back in your history, you must move to more complex tools. Git doesn’t have a modify-history tool, but you can use the rebase tool to rebase a series of commits onto the HEAD they were originally based on instead of moving them to another one. With the interactive rebase tool, you can then stop after each commit you want to modify and change the message, add files, or do whatever you wish. You can run rebase interactively by adding the -i option to git rebase. You must indicate how far back you want to rewrite commits by telling the command which commit to rebase onto.

Thomas