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 I 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.

Top comments (6)

Prayudi Tirta Bayu • May 3 '23

Thank you, I find this article useful!

Just simplify the command, you can also use git log --author=<author_name> to find the commit for specific author

Sarah Waldie • Dec 21 '20

Thank you! I knew this was something I could do, but wasn't 100% sure of how, so I was searching for some guidance. Everything else I found was way too complicated for what I needed. This did the trick!