How to Count the Number of Commits After a Specific Commit in Git
Counting the number of commits after a specific commit in Git is a common task when you make small but frequent commits and need to squash them before rebasing from the main branch. This post shows one simple way to do this in git. Let me know if you know a better solution.
I often like to squash multiple commits together into a single commit. For this, I tend to use the git reset --soft HEAD~n command frequently, where n is the number of commits I'd like to cherrypick.
💡 Update: Ben pointed out in the comments that if you know which commit you want to reset to, you can simply do:git reset --soft <commit-id>instead ofHEAD~n. Not sure why I never thought of this 🤦♂️. That said, the rest of the post is still valid to count the number of commits after a commit.
For a small number of commits, it's easy to just count the number of commits manually. However, often I have a long list of commits and counting them all can be tedious. To address this, I was looking for a command that would give me the number of commits made after a specific commit, and came across rev-list, combined with the count flag.
To count the number of commits made after a specific commit in Git, you can use the following command:
git rev-list <specific_commit>..HEAD --count
Here’s a breakdown of the command:
git rev-list: Lists commit objects in reverse chronological order.<specific_commit>: Replace this with the hash of the commit you are interested in...HEAD: This specifies the range from the specific commit to the latest commit (HEAD).--count: Outputs the number of commits instead of the commit hashes.
For example, if your specific commit hash is abc123, the command would be:
git rev-list abc123..HEAD --count
This will give you the number of commits made after the specified commit up to the latest commit. Now you can plug in this number in the git reset --soft HEAD~n to squash them together (or write a shell script that does this in a single command).
If you're using VS Code with the GitLens extension, you can easily copy the commit SHA, as shown below:
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Comments (5)
> I often like to squash multiple commits together into a single commit. For this, I tend to use the git reset --soft HEAD~n command frequently, where n is the number of commits I'd like to cherrypick. If you know which commit you want to reset to, why not do it this way: > git reset --soft <commit-id> i.e. no counting backwards is necessary, and seems needlessly complicated. surely i am missing something?
Wow, you're absolutely correct. Don't know why I never thought to try this. I've updated the post to mention it. Thanks for pointing it out, Ben.
In my experience, Gitup (https://github.com/git-up/GitUp/) if a great tool for reordering/merging/squashing/renaming commits. I use it daily in combination with Fork (https://git-fork.com/) which allows reviewing/selecting specific chunks and files through a clear UI. I use both to review, rewrite and reorder commits before pushing branches, to make sure my git history is readable and useful.
Thanks for sharing, will check it out!
I use git rebase using the interactive mode. you locate the first commit using git log then run: git rebase -i <commit-sha> then mark each commit you want to squash. Note: you should know what you are doing, use this command with care...