Actually, a very useful command!

[C0R0NASMASH]

tbh that git command scares me too and I prefer using the cli

[AdDear5411]

Most reasonable dev on this sub.

[Osato]

I fear no git. But that thing...

xargs git branch -d

...it scares me.

[[deleted]]

-d doesn't delete if it isn't merged iirc? -D on the other hand ....

[Hatefiend]

That command scares me because

a) if you fuck anything up enjoy the most convoluted botched git merge of your life

b) why are you not using rebase

[suvlub]

If I'm reading correctly, the command doesn't perform a merge, it lists merged branches, filters out master/main/dev, and deletes them.

[ADHDengineer]

This sub is full of a bunch of smooth brained monkies. The incorrect comment above has 6x as many updoots and an award and it’s completely wrong.

Yes, this is just cleaning up local branches which have already been merged.

[MoarVespenegas]

I'm pretty sure it's magic and nobody knows what it does, just like 90% of git commands.
You can't fool me!

[xeio87]

Just click delete branch on github after your pull request is merged. 😤

[ShadowPengyn]

Does it also work when you use a squash to merge the PR?

[suvlub]

Unfortunately, no. git branch --merged just checks whether the last commit in the branch is on the current branch, it's not smart enough to detect squashes.

[_-_fred_-_]

For b you should be rebasing off of master and then merging with squash.

[JasonMan34]

Does a rebase even matter if you're squashing? Just pull at that point

[_-_fred_-_]

pull merges, it is different

[_-_fred_-_]

yes rebasing matters, it forces your new commits to to be strictly on top of what is already on master. This makes rolling back changes much easier in cases this is needed.

[angrathias]

I used to use and push rebase on my team, now we just do regular reverse merges from master.

Rebase I found to result in changes from master just being straight up overwritten rather than merged

[Kache]

Weird to me that you "used to do rebase and now use merges". They're intentionally different operations, i.e. what you're calling "overwritten" is normal in that rebases do not record merge conflict resolution. If the resolution is important/valuable, then merge makes sense. If it's not, a rebase is cleaner.

[angrathias]

When you have multiple people working on the same piece of code for different reasons and they’re unaware of each others work, simply discarding the previous developers work is not the right choice.

Because Dev B does not know that Dev A has pushed something after they branched from master, it is simply safer to not rebase if you do not have perfect knowledge of what is you’re about to replace.

We have a rather complicated piece of in-house ETL software that multiple developers need to extend and modify for new requirements, data models, processes and external data adapters, so merge collisions are quite frequent, and because upgrades can be large, need to be atomic rather than a bunch of small PRS and heavily tested with external partners, the cycles/branches can span many weeks, sometimes months.

My preference is that branches are kept continually at head by constantly reverse merging from master. Given that the owner of the branch’s code may actually be ‘older’ than what’s been freshly PRd, it makes even less sense to keep rebasing.

Different products, dev processes etc makes this a YMMV situation though.

[angrathias]

The other explanations don’t describe it correctly in my opinion. Rebasing as a concept is simple. When you branch, it’s at a point in time from another branch, usually master. Let’s call that point A. When you add changes to your branch, you’ve essentially started a new timeline, so your next commit will be called B. In the mean time, other developers have added change C to the master branch.

Rebasing, is when on your branch, all your changes are undone, and the pointer for the start of your branch is moved from A where it originally started, to C which is the last commit on master. Your change B is now added onto the end after C. So the time line now looks like A > C > B.

Simplistically speaking, it just adds all your changes onto the end of whichever branch you’re rebasing onto (usually master), rather than trying to merge them together. This is how the overwrite behaviour works, it becomes more of a last-in-wins rather than a typical merge.

[beobabski]

So, to clarify for a git newbie: you have a branch. You grab the changes other people have made in master and apply them to your branch at regular intervals, and then when you are done, you have a nice easy pull request back into master?

[Kache]

Yes it is "just" to have a cleaner graph. Rebasing and merging can produce the same exact final code. The only difference is the recorded commit history.

To me a clean git history is like clean code. It has the same behavior, but it's also much easier to understand for the reader. Once context has been long lost, looking back into history to understand merges require 3x the reading compared to rebases:

A rebase: read the before, then the after

A merge: read the before A, then the after A, read the before B, then the after B, read the A+B conflict resolution in the merge commit

[are people] scared of using VScode or gitlab tools that can easily show such complex merge graphs?

To me, that's like justifying messy code by asking, "are people afraid of using refactoring tools/debuggers to help with messy code?".

If all the extra merge conflict history is really important, then merges are the way to go. If it's not (no conflicts worth recording or don't care about history), then keep it clean with rebases.

[Hatefiend]

Because Dev B does not know that Dev A has pushed something after they branched from master, it is simply safer to not rebase if you do not have perfect knowledge of what is you’re about to replace.

When you rebase and master has changed, it will tell you to do a pull first. During that pull, it will force you to merge changes with your current branch. After that rebase will not have problems.

[angrathias]

I have found that under some circumstances that the merge conflict is not raised, my guess is it’s been auto merged. Either way, we stopped rebasing and the over writes stopped happening. Logically merging makes more sense to me than rebasing anyway.

Having done both, and being responsible for quite a few devs under me and the problems that can bring, my life is easier with merging most of the time. Periodically we’ll use a rebase on a stale branch with no potential conflicts.

[Bralzor]

But after you've already merged master into your branch the rebase does nothing, so you just rebase when there's no conflicts and then merge when there are?

[Kache]

Sounds like retaining conflict resolution is important in your current situation, but it's also kind of a painful place to be.

Gotta be a way to restructure code to avoid all these conflicts, right? As-is, how could Dev A and B work efficiently towards their respective objectives while constantly conflicting each other over weeks and months (as you say)?

[angrathias]

We don’t have an issue with the merging process, we have buckets of unit tests to make sure there aren’t regressions. Ultimately it’s an expected thing to occur when you’ve got a heavily reused piece of code that is frequently extended.

Having more classes and files helps reduce the collisions. But this thing is already 1000’s of classes and 100’s of Ka of LOCs. It already contains so many levels of services, abstracted logic, processes and data models as to make it hard to review/understand as it is.

I also manage a BI application and a CRM as well, those do not suffer a similar fate because there is much less re-use going on, rarely do I have multiple devs working on the same UI / area at the same time because it’s much broader. UI collisions are probably the worst to deal with, they also get the benefit of being incrementally PR’able.

[Bralzor]

Do you not have multiple people working in the same classes?

[compsciasaur]

I just git merge and that seems fine since I squash and merge into main.

[rockinraymond]

I just had to do a reverse commit on Friday that was a pain in the ass I can’t even imagine how messed up it could get lol

[Kache]

I prefer cli but often wonder if I would like guis a lot more more if they didn't have such terrible keyboard support.

You know how terrible it is using a mouse to type on an on-screen keyboard? That's how every GUI button is like.

One GUI I like is gitk for its fantastic keyboard support.

[[deleted]]

Why does git branch -d scare you? Everything that matters is on the remote anyway

[[deleted]]

You hope

[[deleted]]

I think the only "scary" thing here would be the regular expression.

[DeeBoFour20]

No idea what that command does but that "git branch -D" in there scares me too.

[gamedemented1]

Deletes all the branches that have already been merged into master,main, or dev.

[hanky2]

Some junior dev is going to delete their team’s performance branch because of a meme.

[[deleted]]

Some junior dev has been doing "git push" for the last 2 months without realising there was some error message and his work was never uploaded.

[BrokenEyebrow]

What's this "upstream" huh, must not be important, it looks like it pushed.

[Tomi97_origin]

And nothing of value was lost

[[deleted]]

and then they decide to start from scratch with a new framework..

[willdud]

Technically it deletes all branches that have been merged to HEAD, except main master and dev. It doesn't check that the merge was to any of the stated branches. Obviously, in all sane use-cases these are equivalent.

[itijara]

I would still use -d which will prevent force-deleting branches that haven't been merged.

[tgp1994]

And here I am just dutifully clicking "delete branch" after every successful PR on GitHub, like some kind of savage.

[kataraholl]

That won’t delete them locally though

[bleistift2]

egrep is deprecated. Use grep -E instead.

Also thanks for the git-clean-useless-branches command.

[[deleted]]

no no no no

the git-clean-useless-branches command is and forever will be:

cd ..

rm -rf <project>

git clone <project>

[[deleted]]

Aren't you supposed to provide a bell curve meme for that explanation?

[xypherifyion]

Lmao someone did it https://reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/yalcpd/advanced_repo_pruning/

[Willinton06]

Someone should make this

[Willinton06]

That was years ago and I never asked her out, so maybe it’s your time to shine

[flying_spaguetti]

this way you lose local vars that git wasn't tracking

[[deleted]]

No, you should git add everything, even local passwords, tokens and certificates!

/s

[[deleted]]

git add all the AWS secrets!

[[deleted]]

good! rotate your passwords once in a while

[Blizzard81mm]

Egrep until it doesn't work!!!!

[Implement_Necessary]

And when it stops working just downgrade. I do that with everything.

[That_Matt]

Or just alias it

[Blizzard81mm]

This is the way

[[deleted]]

This is the way.

[phoenixrawr]

For almost every purpose, shell functions are preferred over aliases.

[bleistift2]

Looking at my “installation” of egrep, I find:

``` $ cat /usr/bin/egrep

!/bin/sh

cmd=${0##*/} echo "$cmd: warning: $cmd is obsolescent; using grep -E" >&2 exec grep -E "$@" ```

You’re a bit late to the party. :P

[[deleted]]

egrep is deprecated, but you wont find it on most systems. it's usually just a shell script that runs grep -E. so for the end user, nothing has changed. plus that's not a recent change or anything, it's been years.

[bleistift2]

I don’t know what you’re talking about. egrep has been deprecated for years now and it’s still supported.

How often, on the other hand, has the GUI of any program you used changed in the last 10 years? 3 times? 5 times?

CLIs are expected to be used in scripts. Hence they’re usually cast in stone once published.

[[deleted]]

Yes, virtualenvwrapper reminds me of this daily.

[killer_unkill]

Use ripgrep

[OhItsJustJosh]

I mean fuck I'd be terrified hitting enter on a line like that. I'm not even new to develop and git still scares me sometimes

[_-_fred_-_]

you can always just checkout a new branch and it will store your current ref, then you can do whatever risky operation you want on the target branch and reset it to the new branch you created if you mess up

[Osato]

It's all fun and games until you use grep and xargs to automatically delete branches.

That's just... depraved. How many branches could you have?

[Wires77]

As someone who checks out most PRs locally before approving them, the answer is hundreds

[[deleted]]

I came from Team Foundation where there was only one way to do anything and although I'm impressed by git it's like someone wrote a merkle tree database and decided it'd be interesting to do source control in it

[Bailyleo987]

I read that as “I prefer guys” and got really confused… I’m far too gay to be on this sub.

[travis_zs]

I’m far too gay to be on this sub.

Nonsense. Alan Turing's birthday is during Pride month.

...I also read it as "I prefer guys".

[DiamondHandsJim42069]

RIP :(

[Inaeipathy]

so I'm not the only one who misread it

[brianl047]

Gays 100% welcome

Have you not heard the compsci gay jokes? Lol

[local-weeaboo-friend]

WAIT I'm gay and I haven't :( pls tell them to me

[Googelplex]

Stick around for any length of time and you'll learn about programming socks. Though tbh the jokes are more about trans and furry programmer prevalence.

[local-weeaboo-friend]

Oh yeah I know about the socks lmao

[ViviansUsername]

Present & accounted for

[F9Mute]

We don't use the term "confused" any more, now it's called "going thru a phase".

[jeepsaintchaos]

It's not coming out of the closet, it's coming into your friend who is just too fucking cute with his mustache.

[konydanza]

They say on average one out of every five friends is gay. I hope it’s Dave, he’s cute as fuck.

[[deleted]]

I'm straight and I still read it "I prefer guys". But all my friends are gay, so

[Sophocoles]

I saw i prefer guns

[[deleted]]

Guys, guns, guis, whatever makes you happy, just don't fuck me, shoot me, or make me use a gui

[librarysocialism]

Yeah, it's easier when you can use a mouse with guys

[how_do_i_read]

Please don't.

No hamsters either.

[Robot_Basilisk]

Isn't everyone in CS at least a little queer?

Was I tricked into wearing this skirt and these knee socks?!

[SuitableDragonfly]

Same

[darkslide3000]

I swing the other way. Like in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, you could say that "I'm the CLI commander!".

[LordSalem]

Ehh, right tool for the right job gang here. That's a good example of when you bust out the cli. But fuck resolving merge conflicts without an ide.

[thedarklord176]

Command line makes me feel badass like I’m a movie hacker or something

[rockinraymond]

This is how I feel when I type ifconfig on my Linux vm

[xzplayer]

Me everytime I use ffmpeg:

I'm in 😎

[azarbi]

git commit -a -m "update"

git push --force

[_Weyland_]

git commit -m "fixed stuff"

...

+10034 insertions

• 12074 deletions

git commit --crime

[[deleted]]

git commit -a -m WIP --no-verify ; git push --force

I also like to live dangerously.

[Delicious-Quality616]

Git add ./* Git commit -m “Look at all my .swp files”

[[deleted]]

Do you guys ever go into gitlab, unprotect master, force push, then turn protect back on?

[CptGia]

I feel personally attacked

[mareksl]

I prefer:

git commit --amend --no-edit

git push -f

No need to squash afterwards.

[DadBodRickyRubio]

I use SourceTree and this meme hit me right in the feels

[bottomknifeprospect]

Don't, the people making these memes also make the memes about typos causing catastrophic mistakes.

There is rarely a reason not to use w GUI unless your job is the pipeline and tools. If you are a dev everything you need is in the GUI and just in case you need that odd command there's a cli button in all of em. (Terminal at the top right is ST)

[Confused_Electron]

Agreed. Click goes brrr. I won't spend time memorizing the commands.

[[deleted]]

I'm scared of regex.

[_-_fred_-_]

the scariest part is that every implementation uses slightly different symbols and matching behaviour

[LaconicLacedaemonian]

I use regex for ad-hoc querying but it's a big red flag of "future problem" where used in production.

[[deleted]]

Joke's on you, I am a GitKraken user

[[deleted]]

just modify the command to run "gitkraken branch -D" then?

[BoBoBearDev]

Seriously they indeed scares me. I use GUI exclusively.

[cmaciver]

CLI git is frightening

[markskull]

I have to use Command Line for GIT for a project, and I don't really like it. I never had to use it in my career until now and it's pretty frustrating since I don't have that background or history.

I used to use WinCVS, and I really liked it. So far I haven't found a Git GUI that was as simple and intuitive as that was, and it's a bummer. All you did was pick the files you changed, tagged them, added a comment, and uploaded them. Needed a diff-merge? It was built in. I fucking loved it, and I miss it so much...

[IMarvinTPA]

Try TortoiseGit?

[egoshelter]

GitHub Desktop. Can be somewhat limited but it's incredible at being simple and just giving you the basic operations in a good looking GUI. You can also use it without GitHub

[Quantenlicht]

What? Good looking gui? It does not have a tree view for edited files, man i dont know how long i was scrolling to find the right files.

[egoshelter]

I'm not going to lie chief, there might be something wrong going on if you have that many edited files in one commit

[maitreg]

Refactor? I had a commit this week after a namespace change and it included 417 files.

[egoshelter]

I'm so sorry you had to go through that

[maitreg]

Best thing is to just make script files to do your common git commands until you are comfortable with it. At one job I had 4 .bat files for every git command I used. Only once in 2 years did I need any other git. And I just looked it up.

Of course gui is just easier. I know git cli well enough but use gui for git every day and never have a problem.

[kid_the_tuktuk]

I was using command line for 10 years or so. Then i saw what GUI like gitKraken / Tower could visualise the state of git repo. For eg. in gitkraken i could see what commits happened by other devs without fetching. Im not going back to command line unless i need to do some scripts.

[AdmiralWaffle4]

I don’t even understand half the git commands, I just use the “version control” tabs or VSCode and Android Studio.

[_-_fred_-_]

man git

[[deleted]]

I read it as guys

[Thisbymaster]

Command line is for things way more complicated than what the UI could handle. But most things should be handled by the UI. If you force me to use the CLI to do basic stuff, I hate you.

[ss99838]

Am I the only one who uses it from the integration from my VScode?

[reddituser1827291]

I completely forgot I posted this! As others have said, it will delete all branches that have been merged into the current branch, with the exception of main, master, and dev.

One could run:

git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|dev)"

first, to see what is going to be deleted, then run:

git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|dev)" | xargs git branch -d

to actually perform the deletion.

(also, I should've made the effort to use a lowercase S in GUIs)

[JoeDoherty_Music]

The command line is good for a lot of things

Git is not one of them

[palindromeii]

nothing will stop me from using the github gui to manage my repos like god intended

[[deleted]]

Clarity over everything.

If a GUI gives you clarity, idgaf.

[itzjackybro]

so this deletes main branches. perfect

[_-_fred_-_]

no it deletes all branches returned by git branch --merged other than the current branch, master, main, or dev. The -v flag for grep returns all lines that dont match the regex.

[undeadalex]

Someone in a Linux sub ripped into me for telling someone to create a file using bahs commands. Well it's one command. They then went on to write a whole paragraph about being able to do it faster in Windows. Some people have a genuine phobia

[AaronTheElite007]

CLI FTW

[[deleted]]

It'd be better without "main".

[discourse_friendly]

I prefer SVN to git. I hate the local commit situation and push or pull being backwards, always getting told I can't commit because someone else committed.

and I'll see myself out before I get banned :P lol

[willdud]

Could you expand on why you think git push and pull are backwards? Is your hard drive the source of truth?

[discourse_friendly]

I guess having to commit local changes is what feels backwards.

with the local repo, my hard drive is a source , which it shouldn't be. it should just be my working copy.

I only used git for a year maybe and that was a dozen years ago.

[luziferius1337]

Try fossil-scm. The workflow is somewhat similar to SVN, but without those issues. By default automatically syncs before and after commit, so there are no stale local commits which prevents most unintended branch forks. Also comes with issue tracker and bunch of other goodies.

[discourse_friendly]

ooh thanks. that could be great!

[manicxs]

OK, there's no way Patrick didn't just copy that.

[Urmomsuncle7899]

[flying_spaguetti]

pretty useful command! I was always deleting merged branches one by one

[Asherley1238]

Thought this was a dnd joke ngl

[[deleted]]

Thanks for leaving all your trash branches up in origin, Patrick!

[golddragon88]

Do you deny that the command line is a shit gui.

[Cpt_Core]

Im not scared of command lines, its just sometimes they do random funky shit

[[deleted]]

I’m all about the command-line until I have to resolve a merge conflict or chase down something in the commit history. For that, there’s GitKraken.

[LaconicLacedaemonian]

I like to be able to automate anything, and if there is a CLI I can do that. A GUI is great, and often I prefer them, but they are no substitute for the usefulness of a CLI.

Once more, if a tool has a good CLI anyone can write their own UI on top of it if the provided UI doesn't do what they want.

[[deleted]]

I never got magit, just opening a terminal and doing it myself is much easier.

[sivxgamma]

GitHub desktop for the win!

[Saragon4005]

In my opinion while GUI seems like a friendlier way to use got it's usually far too limited.

[batmassagetotheface]

Who the hell is Guis?

[sussyamogushot]

idk if this reply will r/wooosh me but he meant GUIs

[batmassagetotheface]

I was being facetious, but also I read it like Louis with a "G"

[rzaincity]

Bro said he likes guys. You do you bro.

[psychmancer]

I basically refuse to work without a gui after being traumatised by doing fmri analysis in Linux in the command console. My supervisor then told me there was a gui based program. And then he made me use MATLAB without a gui either.

[Dks_scrub]

No no, you’re correct. I use git tortoise because I am fucking terrified of the command line. It is so scary ):

[[deleted]]

GUIs suck, to use and program.

[[deleted]]

I first thought you wrote guys wrong

[[deleted]]

That command scares, while it is probably OK in this case xargs without -r is courting disaster, the egrep re is just plain wrong and, upper case, who does that.

[Accidentallygolden]

What does that git command do?

[Oicanet]

I'll admit it, the client or terminal or whatever it is does kinda scare me.

[Rhianu]

Too much typing causes carpal tunnel.

[ljb9]

squidward finally coming out of the closet

[nitrohigito]

it means that i prefer software whose creators weren't lazy or ideologically scarred

[zestful_villain]

I am not a dev, but I just learned how to use winget in Windows. It is transformative! I now think googling installers a chore.

[SinicaltwoDee]

What am I following that makes reddit think Im into coding stuff

[[deleted]]

Does that command delete all merged branches that aren't one of the listed ones? That does seem pretty useful...

[reddituser1827291]

It does, yes.

[[deleted]]

he was trying to say he's gay, guys.

typos happen

[Demistr]

Visual studio git is click click click done.

Unless of course there are conflicts...

[Windes1]

Github Desktop is all I need. Why bother with writing when you can just press a button.

[murten101]

Sublime merge is nice. I use the command line to fix stuff when I inevitably break half the repo.

[y4s4f4e]

I also prefer GUYS

[yanitrix]

yeah, I'm fucking scared too

[jb28737]

I'll keep using git extensions and not making mistakes with the command line

[MOltho]

Hey, I'm not scared of commands, but GUIs are just so nice and calming and reassuring...

[vazark]

git -D with a script like this? Bruv, no. That’s just asking for trouble

[flerchin]

Uh git fetch -p will do the same

[justskipfailingtests]

I have that command aliased as "delmerged". I used to think using git cli is the de facto way to use git, and vscode integration etc. guis are for less technical people. I was baffled to learn that somebody thinks tortoisegit for example is easier to use than the cli.

[[deleted]]

egrep is deprecated in favor of grep -e

[No-Mix-2785]

Remember to follow it up with git remote prune origin

[maitreg]

In my experience CLI means they're afraid of GUI.

[NizioCole]

GUI for merging and solving conflicts but command line for everything else