Question

When doing a git tag, I’m not always great at remembering if HEAD~6 (for example) is inclusive or exclusive.

Given that most of my commits are prefixed with an issue number, I wondered if there is some magic command for searching for the commit SHA from part of its message.

I know it’s easy to do a git log and work from there, but I want more easy 🙂

EDIT : Someone also asked the opposite question: In Git, is there a way to get the “friendly” name for an arbitrary commit?

Answer 1

You can use :/blah syntax to specify a commit whose commit message starts with the given text.

E.g.

git show ":/Issue #299"

This is valid anywhere a commit can be used. E.g.

git cherry-pick ":/Issue #299"

If you actually need the SHA-1 of the commit you can just use rev-parse.

git rev-parse ":/Issue #299"

See the “SPECIFYING REVISIONS” section of the git rev-parse man page:

A colon, followed by a slash, followed by a text:
This names a commit whose commit message starts with the specified text.
This name returns the youngest matching commit which is reachable from any ref.
If the commit message starts with a !, you have to repeat that; the special sequence :/!, followed by something else than ! is reserved for now.