How can one change the timestamp of an old commit in Git?

Question

The answers to How to modify existing, unpushed commits? describe a way to amend previous commit messages that haven\'t yet been pushed upstream. The new messages inherit t

Answer 1

There are already many great answers, but when I want to change date for multiple commits in one day or in one month, I don't find a proper answer. So I create a new script for this with explaintion, hope it will help someone:

#!/bin/bash

# change GIT_AUTHOR_DATE for commit at Thu Sep 14 13:39:41 2017 +0800
# you can change the data_match to change all commits at any date, one day or one month
# you can also do the same for GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

git filter-branch --force --env-filter '

date_match="^Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13+"              

# GIT_AUTHOR_DATE will be @1505367581 +0800, Git internal format 
author_data=$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE;                   
author_data=${author_data#@}                  
author_data=${author_data% +0800}                # author_data is 1505367581     

oneday=$((24*60*60))

# author_data_str will be "Thu, 14 Sep 2017 13:39:41 +0800", RFC2822 format
author_data_str=`date -R -d @$author_data`      

if [[ $author_data_str =~ $date_match ]];
then
    # remove one day from author_data
    new_data_sec=$(($author_data-$oneday))
    # change to git internal format based on new_data_sec
    new_data="@$new_data_sec +0800"             
    export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="$new_data"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

The date will be changed:

AuthorDate: Wed Sep 13 13:39:41 2017 +0800