A couple of quick additions to my dotfiles today:

• git find-fat - find large files that no longer exist
• git trim-fat - remove files entirely from git history

Both come courtesy of GitHub user cmaitchison, specifically from his git_diet repository.

The code¹² is a little opaque, although it’s neat if you’re into bash scripts. Honestly though, you mostly only need to use them. For that, here’s an example:

# Find the 20 (-n) largest blobs that no longer exist (-d)
$ git find-fat -n 20 -d

# From just the filenames (-f), remove those files from the git history
$ git find-fat -n 20 -d -f | git trim-fat

One thing I really love about git is how it works with files on your path named git-*. So I can use git find-fat rather than needing git-find-fat, just as if it were built into git. It’s not that big of a deal, but I still think it’s neat.