Custom Git Commands

Git supports adding new sub commands found in your $PATH. Either add this directory to your $PATH or install symlinks to ~/bin so you can remove any you don't want.

for f in $(\find * -maxdepth 1 -type f -executable -not -path .git) ; do ln --force --verbose -s $(pwd)/$f ~/bin/$f ; done

A custom git command that implements backdating tags as described in https://git-scm.com/docs/git-tag#_on_backdating_tags.

usage: git backtag [-h|-a|-s|-u <key-id>] [-f] [-m <msg>|-F <file>] <tagname> <commit>
    commit    date of commit will be used to backdate tag

Tip: List tags by date:

git log --tags --simplify-by-decoration --pretty="format:%ci %d"

A custom git command that iteratively applies a list of patches allowing any merge issues to be fixed. It effectively makes git cherry-pick resumable.

git log --oneline --reverse master..bar | tee patchlist.txt
git cherry-pick-list patchlist.txt

See https://www.konsulko.com/git-workflow-for-upstreaming-patches-from-a-vendor-kernel-2/ for more details.

A custom git command that resets the local master with the upstream remote master. Useful if you are tracking a canonical master branch.

Note: If your local master is non canonical and has changes then you should not use this and instead use git merge upstream/master.

A custom git command to list or remove locally tracked branches that have been removed on the remote.

usage: git-clean-branches [-h] [--prune] [--force] [--remote REMOTE]

Remove local branches, which are no longer available in the remote

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --prune          Remove branches
  --force          Force deletion
  --remote REMOTE  Remote name (default origin)

Copied from @nemisj https://github.com/nemisj/git-removed-branches/blob/master/git-removed-branches.py (MIT License) but renamed because it's almost an extension to git-clean.

A custom git command to search the parent directories for the topmost git project directory. This handles submodules of any depth whereas git rev-parse --show-toplevel --show-superproject-working-tree only works for one level.

$ tree -a
/home/user/project
├── external
│   ├── library
│   │   ├── .git
├── .git
│   ├── branches
...
$ cd external/library
$ git-top
/home/user/project

A custom git command that synchronizes with a remote that might have many submodule changes that require updating in order to successfully pull the latest changes from the remote. For example, when git pull --recurse-submodules fails with Errors during submodule fetch:, it may be because a submodule has been updated in such a way that it cannot be updated to the latest without being synchronized as well.