Change old commit message on Git

Question

I was trying to edit an old commit message as explained here.

The thing is that now, when I try to run rebase -i HEAD~5 it says interactive rebas

Answer 1

Just wanted to provide a different option for this. In my case, I usually work on my individual branches then merge to master, and the individual commits I do to my local are not that important.

Due to a git hook that checks for the appropriate ticket number on Jira but was case sensitive, I was prevented from pushing my code. Also, the commit was done long ago and I didn't want to count how many commits to go back on the rebase.

So what I did was to create a new branch from latest master and squash all commits from problem branch into a single commit on new branch. It was easier for me and I think it's good idea to have it here as future reference.

From latest master:

git checkout -b new-branch

Then

git merge --squash problem-branch
git commit -m "new message" 

Referece: https://github.com/rotati/wiki/wiki/Git:-Combine-all-messy-commits-into-one-commit-before-merging-to-Master-branch