I ran into an interesting problem today that took a bit longer to figure out, and so I will post it here in the hopes that others will find the solution faster than I did.

My problem: I am inspecting a rather large and complex piece of software and need to look at its history – more specifically, I need to figure out when certain branches were created and who created them.

Now, I could have just hacked together a throw-away solution, but that’s not who I am. As I was looking, I found that there didn’t seem to be much on this – aside from the Stack Overflow questions.

So I whipped up a little script that gets all of the branches in the git repo and lists the details of their first commit. These details include the date, and creator – which is what I needed. (Bash script)

#
# Author: Caleb Shortt
#
# For some reason, lists the files and directories'
# history as well...(They're not all branches)
#
# Sources:
# Stack Overflow: Question: "What is the easiest/fastest way to find out when
# a git branch was created"
#

readarray -t branch_list <<< $(git branch -a)

for branch in ${branch_list[@]}
do
    echo '---------------------------------------------'
    echo "Branch: $branch"
    echo '---------------------------------------------'
    git show --summary `git merge-base master $branch`
done

Now there is a little hiccup with the script also printing out the details of whatever is in the directory, but the details for the branches are in there. I’ll update this if I figure out why it’s doing that.