Question

I need to do several “two-step” or “three-step” commands in Git quite frequently, that require me to also specify a branch name as a parameter – things like:

git checkout (branch name)
git pull origin (branch name)

or stuff like that. I would like to “automate” this into an alias – but a simple Git alias won’t do – right?

So how can I do this in a Bash shell script? I am well versed in MS-DOS/Windows batch scripts – but I am a total newbie to Bash.

All the examples of Bash alias with more than one Git command I’ve seen so far seem to not have any parameters…… but I am jumping back and forth between various branches, so I definitely need to define which branch to check out and update from the central repo…

Any help? Any blog posts or articles that a *nix newbie would understand? Any pointers are highly welcome!

Answer 1

You can define an alias like this:

[alias]
  chepull = !git checkout $1 && git pull origin

You can do:

git chepull branch_name 

Note: $1 is intentionally not specified in git pull origin, but should work as intended.