About #git

Even if committing changes with git is straightforward, sometimes you want to verify all changes before doing it (e.g. to come up with with a nice and meaningfull commit message). Luckily there is --verbose switch for git commit. According to the manual (git commit --help):

-v, --verbose

Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would be committed at the bottom of the commit message template to help the user describe the commit by reminding what changes the commit has.

For some compatibility reasons I needed to checkout specific branch or tag in the Git repository using only it’s name (last part without refs/.../ prefix) from a bash script.

For Mercurial repositories it’s not a problem at all thanks to:

hg checkout $tagOrBranch

I haven’t found similar solution using git checkout, so as a workaround I’ve prepared the following bash script to do the job:

git fetch --all
if git show-ref | grep "refs/remotes/origin/$tagOrBranch"
then
    echo "It looks like a branch"
    git checkout -b $tagOrBranch
    git pull origin $tagOrBranch
else
    if git show-ref --tags | grep "refs/tags/$tagOrBranch\$"
    then
        echo "It looks like a tag"
        git checkout tags/$branchOrTag
    else
        echo "No branch / tag '$branchOrTag' found"
        exit 1
    fi
fi