How do you fix a bad merge, and replay your good commits onto a fixed merge?

Question

I accidentally committed an unwanted file (filename.orig while resolving a merge) to my repository several commits ago, without me noticing it until now. I want

Answer 1

This is the best way:
http://github.com/guides/completely-remove-a-file-from-all-revisions

Just be sure to backup the copies of the files first.

EDIT

The edit by Neon got unfortunately rejected during review.
See Neons post below, it might contain useful information!

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E.g. to remove all *.gz files accidentally committed into git repository:

$ du -sh .git ==> e.g. 100M
$ git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch *.gz' HEAD
$ git push origin master --force
$ rm -rf .git/refs/original/
$ git reflog expire --expire=now --all
$ git gc --prune=now
$ git gc --aggressive --prune=now

That still didn't work for me? (I am currently at git version 1.7.6.1)

$ du -sh .git ==> e.g. 100M

Not sure why, since I only had ONE master branch. Anyways, I finally got my git repo truely cleaned up by pushing into a new empty and bare git repository, e.g.

$ git init --bare /path/to/newcleanrepo.git
$ git push /path/to/newcleanrepo.git master
$ du -sh /path/to/newcleanrepo.git ==> e.g. 5M 

(yes!)

Then I clone that to a new directory and moved over it's .git folder into this one. e.g.

$ mv .git ../large_dot_git
$ git clone /path/to/newcleanrepo.git ../tmpdir
$ mv ../tmpdir/.git .
$ du -sh .git ==> e.g. 5M 

(yeah! finally cleaned up!)

After verifying that all is well, then you can delete the ../large_dot_git and ../tmpdir directories (maybe in a couple weeks or month from now, just in case...)