How to Cherry Pick Commits into a New Branch

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to cherry pick a bunch of your own commits into a new branch in git? I personally don’t like to use git cherry-pick since it’s usually a sign that something went wrong, but unfortunately sometimes it’s the only way out of a sticky git situation. This happened to me recently at work and these were the steps I took to recreate my branch.

Step 1

First I needed to search the list of commits to find the ones that were relevant to me:
git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09%an%x09%s" | grep "Liz Lam"

Woah!? What did you just type you ask?!!??! Let’s look at it in detail.

• git log gives you a list of commits in a repository.
• --pretty=format: allows you to format the commits in a way that makes sense to you (or in this case, me).
• %h prints SHA1 hash (short version) .
• %x09 prints a tab.
• %an prints the author name.
• %s prints the summary of the commit.

So put it altogether and git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09%an%x09%s" will output something like this:

02705d38d4    Fabien Villepinte    l10n: fr.po Fix some typos from round3    
5a05494049    Fabien Villepinte    l10n: fr.po Fix some typos
ca1b411648    Johannes Schindelin   mingw: safe-guard a bit more against getenv` 

I then pipe that into grep "Liz Lam" to only get commits by me.

Step 2

Once of have a list of commits by me, I’ll inspect and manually pick the ones I’m interested in. Let’s pretend I came up with a list like this:

ff92f85cac c8879ed156 b01cb9a3f9

I then create a new branch and cherry pick the list of SHA1 commits:
git checkout -b my_new_branch
git cherry-pick ff92f85cac git cherry-pick c8879ed156 git cherry-pick b01cb9a3f9

Voila! Now I have a newly created branch with my freshly picked commits.