git rev-parse --git-dir
My coworker Guillermo Castro (aka the JavaGeek) found this one by pure necessity. He was told recently that a bunch of related changes which had been checked in over a series of separate commits needed to be merged into an emergency patch branch for production. No problem he thought, git cherry-pick to the rescue! Not so fast. For 90% of the cases, yes he could just cherry-pick an entire commit into the patch branch. But there was that 10% of the cases where few files that were supposed to be part of the patch which were checked in to commits that contained changes to files which were not to be included in the branch. Here is how he solved this problem:
- he knew that the files he was interested resided under two directories
- he knew the sha1 commit hash for the commit that contained changes to the files he was interested in (but also had commits to other files he wasn't)
- he wanted only the changes to files under the two directories to be part of his commit.
git log -1 -p
The "-1" tells git to only prepare a patch file for the files under the paths specified based on the first commit (which is the one you specified in the <commit hash> param.
Along with the above, he also found a way to cherry-pick commits without actually committing them locally (i.e. just keep the changes staged)
git cherry-pick --no-commit
Also, if you are on a Mac, there is a nice version of gitk called gitx I highly recommend you grab. It's "pretty" and has some neat features which you can find in the screencasts section of the site.