Everyone screws up, and that comes to finger flops when typing that new tag name.

If the tag is only local, it is two step process, create a new tag from the old tag and delete the old tag:

git tag new_tag_name old_tag_name
git tag -d old_tag_name

But if you have pushed that bad tag name to a remote, then you have another two steps. Deleting that remote tag makes use of the refspec reference and only using a destination with an ‘'empty’ source. Assuming your remote is named origin (git remote -v), than this what you need to do (REMEMBER TO INCLUDE THAT COLON):

git push origin :refs/tags/old_tag_name

And push the new tag to your remote so everyone else will receive that new tag on a pull:

git push origin --tags

Note: The colon isn’t a “delete flag”. Git push and git pull both accept zero or more refspecs as their final argument(s). Now read about refspecs, really read it… . A colon separates source from destination in a refspec. The command git push origin :foo has an empty source and essentially says “push nothing to branch foo of origin”, or, in other words, “make branch foo on origin not exist”.

Sub-Note: This is NOT the same as pushing an empty branch or tag, you really are pushing ‘nothing’ and thus with nothing to reference that tag vanishes (Well I’m assuming it exists somewhere till garbage collection is run)

Sub-Sub-Note: ;-) Yes, I agree with a lot of others that instead of using an empty source in the ref spec it would be waaaayyyyy more initiative to allow a remote parameter to be passed to the existing branch and tag delete options to do this type of deletion.