See commits between branches (git cherry) with descriptions?

Question

The git cherry command is great for seeing what commits have happened between two branches. However, by default it just gives you a list of commit IDs - not that informative.

$ git cherry master dev # Commits in "dev" since it forked from "master"
+ 54408ddc6403376c638d5bfc94c033ab655da7b3
+ 68bc4277954b7de4c95881904de22f1d443366ae
+ d74ab86eee75a8e5c1a835a6e69e74c01d4186e8

How can I get the same list with more information?

Answer 1

You can use git cherry -v master dev

It will show commit message with commit hash.

Answer 2

You can achieve this by piping git cherry output through two more commands:

First use sed to remove the + at the start of each line to leave the raw commit IDs:

$ git cherry master dev | sed 's/^+ //'
54408ddc6403376c638d5bfc94c033ab655da7b3
68bc4277954b7de4c95881904de22f1d443366ae
d74ab86eee75a8e5c1a835a6e69e74c01d4186e8

Now use xargs --max-lines=1 to pass each commit ID to git log -1, which can then display other information about each commit:

$ git cherry master dev | sed 's/^+ //' | xargs --max-lines=1 git log -1 --pretty=format:"%h [%ad] %an : %s" --date=short
54408dd [2013-10-09] Robin Winslow : Update Binaries submodule
68bc427 [2013-10-09] Robin Winslow : Update reference dependencies for Website
d74ab86 [2013-10-09] Robin Winslow : Remove non-exisent files from Website project

Note: You can tailor the --pretty=format:"%h [%ad] %an : %s" --date=short part to get whatever output you like from git log