[git] How to remove/delete a large file from commit history in Git repository?

(The best answer I've seen to this problem is: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42544963/714112 , copied here since this thread appears high in Google search rankings but that other one doesn't)

A blazingly fast shell one-liner

This shell script displays all blob objects in the repository, sorted from smallest to largest.

For my sample repo, it ran about 100 times faster than the other ones found here.
On my trusty Athlon II X4 system, it handles the Linux Kernel repository with its 5,622,155 objects in just over a minute.

The Base Script

git rev-list --objects --all \
| git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' \
| awk '/^blob/ {print substr($0,6)}' \
| sort --numeric-sort --key=2 \
| cut --complement --characters=13-40 \
| numfmt --field=2 --to=iec-i --suffix=B --padding=7 --round=nearest

When you run above code, you will get nice human-readable output like this:

...
0d99bb931299  530KiB path/to/some-image.jpg
2ba44098e28f   12MiB path/to/hires-image.png
bd1741ddce0d   63MiB path/to/some-video-1080p.mp4

Fast File Removal

Suppose you then want to remove the files a and b from every commit reachable from HEAD, you can use this command:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch a b' HEAD

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