git tricks

Tracking the Merge Request where a commit originated

You may need to do a bit of digging to find the correct commit, but this handy command will list all of the commits labeled as merges that date back to when a commit was created:

git log <SHA-1 for commit of interest>..devel --ancestry-path --merges

Typically, the merge request commit should look something like:

commit <hash>
Merge: <branch commit> <devel head at time of commit>
Author: Somebody different than the author of the commit
Date:   XXXX

    Merge branch 'xx/xxx' into 'devel'
    
  Merge request name
    
    Merge description
    
    See merge request !447

So, with this in mind, we can pipe the entire output to awk and let it grab the last occurence of the informative line "Merge branch ..." Since this part of a commit's log is programmatically written, we can pattern match it with a reasonable level of confidence:

git log <SHA-1 for commit of interest>..devel --ancestry-path --merges | awk '/Merge branch / {a=$0} END{print a}'

Alternatively, if you are more of a grep person, you can do the same thing, just pipe it to tail to get the last item (or don't if you want to see all of the subsequent merges it belongs to):

git log <SHA-1 for commit of interest>..devel --ancestry-path --merges | grep 'Merge branch' | tail -n 1

Abort a git merge

git reset --merge