git-annex-forget(1)

💅 git-annex-forget(1) — General Commands Manual 🎀

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for git-annex-forget from the General Commands Manual, and it is genuinely one of those "spring cleaning for your repo" situations, no cap ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

git-annex-forget — prune git-annex branch history

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

git annex forget

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so basically this makes the git-annex branch get rewritten, and the whole vibe is that it throws away historical data about past locations of files. past locations. gone. poof. 💨

the resulting branch will use less space, which is slay, but heads up: git annex log will not be able to show where files used to be located anymore. it's giving amnesia but make it storage-efficient 🧠✨

now here's the part that is genuinely iconic and also a little bit terrifying — when this rewritten branch gets merged into other clones of the repository, git-annex will automatically perform the same rewriting to their local git-annex branches. so the forgetfulness just... propagates. out from its starting point. until all repositories running git-annex have forgotten their old history. it spreads like a rumor fr fr 😭

lowkey important: you may need to force git to push the branch to any git repositories that are not running git-annex. those ones don't get the memo automatically bestie, you gotta tell them yourself 💌

💖 OPTIONS 💖

• --drop-dead — also prune references to repositories that have been marked as dead. like, if a repo is already dead to you, this cleans up the leftovers too. no ghosts, only closure 🪦✨

also the git-annex-common-options(1) can be used. yes queen, the classics still apply 👑

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• git-annex(1)
• git-annex-dead(1)
• git-annex-filter-branch(1)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Joey Hess <id@joeyh.name>

okay that's the whole page bestie!! and yes, the footer really is just the manual name again — git-annex-forget(1) — waving at you from the bottom like the little signature it is 🫶 go forth and forget responsibly, mwah 💖🎀🌸