Question

all of my git commit messages start with

  refs #SOME_NUMBER

where SOME_NUMBER is a number from 1 up. I would like to parse all commmit messages on
my working branch, store all of the SOME_NUMBERs in a list, remove duplicates, and save to file. Not really sure where to start….

Answer 1

You can do that pretty easily with this shell one-liner:

$ git log --format=%s | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | sed 's/#\(.*\)/\1/' | sort -n | uniq > refs.txt

Explanation:

1. git log --format=%s displays the first line of every commit message
2. cut -f 2 -d ' ' splits the line by a space, and prints the second part of the (the #SOME_NUMBER portion)
3. sed 's/#\(.*\)/\1/' removes the number sign from the number
4. sort sorts the entries in ascending numerical order
5. uniq ensures that each number is only printed once
6. > refs.txt prints the output to a file called refs.txt.