A useful Git ’trick’

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Lately someone, who had left my team, left behind him a very big branch that its base can not be easily detected (due to the inflated number of branches we have in that repo). Following are couple of ways that would have helped me to detect that branch (saying would have to imply to you that it didn’t, due to the big number of merges in that branch, but it indeed would have helped in a bit smaller repo).

Git: List all the branches compared to this branch with behind/ahead logs

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#!/bin/bash
current_branch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
echo "Branch analysis for: $current_branch"

for branch in $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short)' refs/remotes refs/heads | grep -v "$current_branch" | grep -v "staging-mas"); do
    if merge_base=$(git merge-base "$branch" HEAD 2>/dev/null); then
        ahead=$(git rev-list --count "$merge_base..HEAD" 2>/dev/null)
        behind=$(git rev-list --count "$merge_base..$branch" 2>/dev/null)
        if [ "$ahead" -gt 0 ]; then
            echo "$branch: $ahead commits ahead, $behind commits behind"
        fi
    fi
done

Trying to find only the modified files

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The previous way didn’t help much in my case, I found that the optimal way would be just migrating the files I care about into a separate branch (since there are no dependencies in this repo). I needed to get the files that were modified in this branch by that person:

git log main..HEAD --author="The Dude Full Name <TheDudeEmail@smth.edu>" --name-status --pretty=format:

لّermontov

Git: List all the branches compared to this branch with behind/ahead logs

Trying to find only the modified files