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IMPORTANT NOTE: although this page has a "gitolite.com" URL, this is not about gitolite. That's just an artifact of "sitaramc.github.com" being translated to "gitolite.com" and so ALL my git related stuff gets carried over. Gitolite documentation has another /gitolite in the URL, so you can tell. My apologies for this confusion.

grep

git grep is very, very, powerful. It has pretty much all the normal grep options, plus:

• doesn’t search files that are not revisioned (untracked, excluded/ignored, etc)

• with --cached, looks only in the cache

• with one or more ref names, searched only within those revisions

• can take a pattern, like *.c, to restrict the files searched

• can do --and, --or, --not, etc with patterns. This is a pretty big wow. As https://gitster.livejournal.com/27674.html says:

  git grep -e ';;' --and --not -e 'for *(.*;;' -- '*.c'

  which searches for ‘;;’ in all C files, unless they occur in a typical for (;;) { type of construct.

• finally, there’s a somewhat gratuitously thrown in --all-match option, which says “match any of these strings, but print matches only from files that have all of them”. I wonder whose scratch that was… ;-)

log and show

• git lga is pretty cool; lga is an alias in my config for

  log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate --all

• Check the logs to see what’s happened recently

  git log [--stat] -[p] [-n <number of commits to show>]
  git log "@{yesterday}.."
      # note the suffix "..", since the default is prefix "..", which is
      # probably not what you want
  git log somefile.c

• git show is almost an alias for git log -p -n 1. In general, git show does the right thing: shows a commit as a commit, a tree as a plain “ls”, etc. But if you’re printing a large blob you better use a pager or redirect!

  git show [ HEAD^ | HEAD^^ | HEAD@{3} | origin | origin/master | etc ]
  git show 7a8b9c     # or some hex number; shows you the object
  git show HEAD~3:file.c  # get file.c from 3 versions back

reflog

…see this more detailed note

show-branch

• git show-branch -a is useful to get a bird’s eye view of all your branches and their topological relationships.

• git show-branch -gN (N is some number) shows you reflog info for the current branch, including topological relationships and relative time. This is useful if you had a lot of rebases or amended commits and you think you might need one of them back :-) See reflog for more on this

• if you need serious troubleshooting with branches, use the following. It may be useful in some contexts where git lg is too complex to figure out what tip contains what commit, and you are unable to use gitk

  git show-branch $(git show-ref -h |cut -c41-)

cherry (not cherry-pick)

• summary: + shows you commits you have that the ‘upstream’ doesn’t

  git cherry -v upstream [head]

• detail: for every commit in ‘head’ that doesn’t exist in ‘upstream’

  • prefix - if there is at least an equivalent commit
  • prefix + if there’s not even that

• TIP: if you’re trying to cut some branches (like git branch --merged)

  • put the candidate to be cut on the right side, and
  • make sure there are no +s in the output

cat-file (repo object) and ls-tree (tree object)

Note: I’m not sure what, if any, is the difference between show and cat-file -p for “blob” objects. For commits there is a subtle difference. (Try it)

# any object
git cat-file [ -t | -s | -p ] 789abc
    # find the type or size of an object, or pretty print it
    # If it's a blob, I'd use use "git show" until we find out what
    # "pretty" means for arbitrary blobs :-)
git cat-file blob 789abc        # cat the object

# any tree
git ls-tree         # files and directories, top level only
git ls-tree -l      # also show the size of the object
git ls-tree -d      # only directories
git ls-tree -r      # recurse, only files
git ls-tree -r -d   # recurse, only directories
git ls-tree -r -t   # recurse, both directories and files

ls-files

To get listings of various types of files, use git ls-files. The common but less intuitive ones are shown here, the rest can be had from the man page:

# deleted files and modified files (deleted files are also counted as
# modified, so may come up twice...
git ls-files -d -m
# what's in the index; includes files that were "git add"ed
git ls-files -s
# conflicted files
git ls-files -u
# "other files"; includes EVERYthing not in d/m/s, I think
# seems to be equal to untracked + ignored
git ls-files -o
# untracked files only
git ls-files --exclude-standard -o
# ignored files only
git ls-files --exclude-standard -o -i