invalid author/committer line - missing space before email

Question

I have a git repository that was cloned from a bzr repository using git-remote-bzr as follows: git clone bzr::/repo new-repo. After a few hundreds of commits, I executed git fsck and I got the following error for all the bzr commits:

error in commit 41bf5: invalid author/committer line - missing space before email

When I check these revisions with git cat-file -p 41bf5 I can indeed see that the author name and the email are not separated with a space.

How can I add this missing space for all the bad commits ?

I have full access to the repo on the server so I can rewrite the history without any problems. After modifications the users of the code will have to reclone the repository. I already tried without success the solutions proposed in the following posts:

• How do I change the author of a commit in git?
• Change commit author at one specific commit

Answer 1

The solution to my question came from a friend that asked me to write the answer on his behalf:

1. Filter the repo, changing the bogus author with the following. Note that this should be on two separate lines (normally using shift+enter):

   $ git filter-branch --commit-filter 'case "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" in
   > *author\<\ email*) GIT_AUTHOR_NAME=author_name; GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=author_email;; esac; git commit-tree "$@" '
   

2. Since the faulty commits are still in the repository, git fsck will still fail on them. To get rid of those commits, clone the repo and then prune unused objects:

   $ git clone badrepo goodrepo && cd goodrepo
   $ git gc --prune=all
   

3. The new repository is clean. git fsck returns no errors.

Answer 2

You can find a perfectly working example on git-scm.com. As already mentioned by torek, it uses git filter-branch to rewrite all the history affected by your problem.

You will have to change it a bit:

$ git filter-branch --commit-filter '
    if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "name_and_email" ];
    then
            GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="name";
            GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="email";
            git commit-tree "$@";
    else
            git commit-tree "$@";
    fi' HEAD

Not sure whether the $GIT_AUTHOR_NAME will work on the invalid commits, but if it does the above command should do the trick for one author.

---

If all your commits have the problem, you can skip the if thing and use a regex or something like that to automatically find the border between name and email. That way you can do it completely automatically for all authors.