Short answer is you need to add a !git
, in front of the diff, to tell git it is a shell command. So this:
git config --global alias.diffsvn '!git diff `git log --grep git-svn-id | grep commit | sed "s/commit //g" | head -1` HEAD'
I suggest this instead:
git config --global alias.diffsvn '!git diff `git log --grep git-svn-id -1 | sed -n "s/commit //p"` HEAD'