Not so popular git commands

Last updated Dec 22, 2023 Published Oct 25, 2021

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

Recently I’ve experienced a scenario that made my git skill in check, I was wondering if I could see the files that changed for a list of commits. From that, I tried to expand some questions around git. The goal here is to share a few git commands that are not popular like commit, push or rebase.

Are you not familiar with git yet? Have a look at the intro I made here.

What has changed?

Recently I came across this command that depicts what has been done by commit, renaming, deleting or adding files. It was quite a surprise for me as I had never heard about this option.

git whatchanged

the output would be something like:

commit 7567155a8b62c9d8208c2f9b5d86a5026fb780b5 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: marabesi <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Nov 22 19:27:53 2021 -0300

    refactor: renames stub to github.commits.json

:100644 100644 33de7d1 f9ff071 M        setupTest.js
:100644 100644 85c2b71 85c2b71 R100     stubs/githuapi.json     stubs/github.commits.json



commit 10d8a8e748e1b28aaaa08d7ad674a85f30f877ae
Author: marabesi <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Nov 22 19:27:01 2021 -0300

    refactor: moves github api stubs under stubs folder

:100644 100644 ceb6b95 33de7d1 M        setupTest.js
:100644 100644 85c2b71 85c2b71 R100     src/githuapi.json       stubs/githuapi.json
:100644 100644 0967ef4 0967ef4 R100     src/github.empty.languages.json stubs/github.empty.languages.json
:100644 100644 dc1751b dc1751b R100     src/github.empty.topics.json    stubs/github.empty.topics.json
:100644 100644 bbf13c7 bbf13c7 R100     src/github.languages.json       stubs/github.languages.json
:100644 100644 2af19a8 2af19a8 R100     src/github.topics.json  stubs/github.topics.json

Commit add interactive

git add -i

Merge and squash

Github by default offers strategies to merge code into branches, rebase and squash. While rebase in my experience is a command a bit more spread squashing via command line is not that popular - often I go to GitHub and open a merge request just for that feature. To this end, we will still use rebase, but the strategy is different1:

  1. git rebase -i main
  2. In the list of commits, leave the first one as it is
  3. For the second onwards write s for squash

Filter commits by date

git log --after="2021-06-01" --until="2021-06-30"

Search in commits

git log --grep "my text here"

refs How to search a Git repository by commit message?

Search History

  • git show
  • git log my/file.md

Resources

Footnotes

  1. A few comments on gist around squashing: https://gist.github.com/aortbals/2aeb557bf127dd7ae88ea63da93479fc ↩

Made with 💖 by @MatheusMarabesi