Git Grabbag
Recently I’ve had reason to do a bit more git slicing and dicing than usual. Here are a few notes to myself for next time.
Investigate commits affecting a path since a date
A graph of relevant commits
git log --since="2.weeks" --graph -- path/to/file/or/dir
A list of affected files
git log --since="2022-10-20" --name-status --oneline -- path/to/file/or/dir
A deduplicated list of all affected files
git log --since="2022-10-20" --name-status --oneline -- path/to/file/or/dir | grep "path/to/file/or/dir" | sort | uniq
Diff change since a date
git diff 'develop@{2022-10-20}' HEAD -- path/to/file/or/dir
Replace develop with any branch name, or HEAD.
The date can be a variety of formats:
- “2008-01-15"
- "2 years 1 day 3 minutes ago”
As usual, the official docs are very comprehensive.
Partial stash
git stash records the current state of your working directory. But sometimes it’s useful to split your changes up into multiple stashes.
Pushing a stash with a message and pathspec allows you to stash specific files with a message:
git stash push -m "My message" path/to/file/or/dir
Apply changes from a particular stash
If you’ve created multiple stashes, you might want to apply the changes from a particular stash.
Stashes can be listed with their names:
git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on develop: c74abac Remove stray characters: Come back to this
stash@{1}: WIP on develop: c74abac Remove stray characters: Some other message
stash@{2}: WIP on develop: c74abac Remove stray characters: My message
Each stash entry is listed with its name (e.g. stash@{0} is the latest entry, stash@{1} is the one before, etc.), the name of the branch that was current when the entry was made, and a short description of the commit the entry was based on.
From the git stash docs.
Find the message you want, then use the stash index to operate on that stash. e.g.
git stash apply 2
To apply the “My message” stash.
Working with submodules
Setup:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Escape hatch:
git submodule deinit -f .