How to cherry-pick multiple commits

Question

I have two branches. Commit a is the head of one, while the other has b, c, d, e and f on top of a. I want to move c, d, e and f to first branch without commit b. Using cherry pick it is easy: checkout first branch cherry-pick one by one c to f and rebase second branch onto first. But is there any way to cherry-pick all c-f in one command?

Here is a visual description of the scenario (thanks JJD):

Answer 1

Git 1.7.2 introduced the ability to cherrypick a range of commits. From the release notes:

git cherry-pick" learned to pick a range of commits (e.g. "cherry-pick A..B" and "cherry-pick --stdin"), so did "git revert"; these do not support the nicer sequencing control "rebase [-i]" has, though.

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Including important comments (credits to respective authors)

Note 1: In the "cherry-pick A..B" form, A should be older than B. If they're the wrong order the command will silently fail. – damian

Note 2: Also, this will not cherry-pick A, but rather everything after A up to and including B. – J. B. Rainsberger

Note 3: To include A just type git cherry-pick A^..B – sschaef

Answer 2

The simplest way to do this is with the onto option to rebase. Suppose that the branch which current finishes at a is called mybranch and this is the branch that you want to move c-f onto.

# checkout mybranch
git checkout mybranch

# reset it to f (currently includes a)
git reset --hard f

# rebase every commit after b and transplant it onto a
git rebase --onto a b

Answer 3

Or the requested one-liner:

git rebase --onto a b f

Answer 4

You can use a serial combination of git rebase and git branch to apply a group of commits onto another branch. As already posted by wolfc the first command actually copies the commits. However, the change is not visible until you add a branch name to the top most commit of the group.

Please open the picture in a new tab ...

To summarize the commands in text form:

1. Open gitk as a independent process using the command: gitk --all &.
2. Run git rebase --onto a b f.
3. Press F5 in gitk. Nothing changes. But no HEAD is marked.
4. Run git branch selection
5. Press F5 in gitk. The new branch with its commits appears.

This should clarify things:

• Commit a is the new root destination of the group.
• Commit b is the commit before the first commit of the group (exclusive).
• Commit f is the last commit of the group (inclusive).

Afterwards, you could use git checkout feature && git reset --hard b to delete the commits c till f from the feature branch.

In addition to this answer, I wrote a blog post which describes the commands in another scenario which should help to generally use it.

Answer 5

To apply J. B. Rainsberger and sschaef's comments to specifically answer the question... To use a cherry-pick range on this example:

git checkout a
git cherry-pick b..f

or

git checkout a
git cherry-pick c^..f

Answer 6

If you have selective revisions to merge, say A, C, F, J from A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J commits, simply use below command:

git cherry-pick A C F J

Answer 7

git rev-list --reverse b..f | xargs -n 1 git cherry-pick

Answer 8

To cherry pick from a commit id up to the tip of the branch, you can use:

git cherry-pick commit_id^..branch_name

Answer 9

git format-patch --full-index --binary --stdout range... | git am -3

Answer 10

Actually, the simplest way to do it could be to:

1. record the merge-base between the two branches: MERGE_BASE=$(git merge-base branch-a branch-b)
2. fast-forward or rebase the older branch onto the newer branch

3. rebase the resulting branch onto itself, starting at the merge base from step 1, and manually remove commits that are not desired:

   git rebase ${SAVED_MERGE_BASE} -i
   

   Alternatively, if there are only a few new commits, skip step 1, and simply use

   git rebase HEAD^^^^^^^ -i
   

   in the first step, using enough ^ to move past the merge-base.

You will see something like this in the interactive rebase:

pick 3139276 commit a
pick c1b421d commit b
pick 7204ee5 commit c
pick 6ae9419 commit d
pick 0152077 commit e
pick 2656623 commit f

Then remove lines b (and any others you want)

Answer 11

Here's a script that will allow you to cherry-pick multiple commits in a row simply by telling the script which source and target branches for the cherry picks and the number of commits:

https://gist.github.com/nickboldt/99ac1dc4eb4c9ff003a1effef2eb2d81

To cherry-pick from your branch to master (uses the current branch as source):

./gcpl.sh -m

To cherry-pick the latest 5 commits from your 6.19.x branch to master:

./gcpl.sh -c 5 -s 6.19.x -t master