How do I get the list of branches not merged into master, ordered by most recent commit?

Question

For our buildbot, I want to display the most recently-updated active (non-released) branches. Let's say I have a master branch, as well as the following, from oldest to newest commit:

• branch1 (not merged into master )
• branch2 (merged)
• branch3 (not merged)

I am able to get each of these lists separately... eg to get all the branches not merged into master :

$ git branch -r --no-merged origin/master
origin/branch1
origin/branch3

Or to get the top fifteen branches, ordered by most recent commit (via https://coderwall.com/p/ndinba ):

$ git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format='%(committerdate:short) %(refname:short)' --count=15 refs/remotes/origin/
2013-03-22 origin/branch3
2013-03-22 origin/branch2
2013-03-22 origin/master
2013-03-22 origin/branch1

So I basically want that second list, minus branch2 (with or without master ). Hope that makes sense?

Answer 1

You could combine the two, like this:

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format="%(committerdate:short) %(refname:short)" --count=15 $(git branch -r --no-merged origin/master | sed -e 's#^ *#refs/remotes/#')

That will limit the for-each-ref to processing only the branches that branch --no-merged reports...

Edit: fixed formatting of git branch output after actually testing...

Answer 2

Can't you just grep out branch2?

Basically, something like:

for branch in `git branch -r --no-merged origin/master`; do git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format='%(committerdate:short) %(refname:short)' --count=15 refs/remotes/origin/ | grep $branch; done;

That worked for me given your sample output.

Answer 3

With git 2.7 (Q4 2015), git for-each-ref , will support the --no-merged option

git for-each-ref --no-merged master refs/heads/

With the doc:

--no-merged [<object>]:

Only list refs whose tips are not reachable from the specified commit (HEAD if not specified).

---

See commit 4a71109 , commit ee2bd06 , commit f266c91 , commit 9d306b5 , commit 7c32834 , commit 35257aa , commit 5afcb90 , ..., commit b2172fd (07 Jul 2015), and commit af83baf (09 Jul 2015) by Karthik Nayak ( KarthikNayak ) .
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 9958dd8 , 05 Oct 2015)}

Some features from " git tag -l " and " git branch -l " have been made available to " git for-each-ref " so that eventually the unified implementation can be shared across all three, in a follow-up series or two.

* kn/for-each-tag-branch:
  for-each-ref: add '--contains' option
  ref-filter: implement '--contains' option
  parse-options.h: add macros for '--contains' option
  parse-option: rename parse_opt_with_commit()
  for-each-ref: add '--merged' and '--no-merged' options
  ref-filter: implement '--merged' and '--no-merged' options
  ref-filter: add parse_opt_merge_filter()
  for-each-ref: add '--points-at' option
  ref-filter: implement '--points-at' option  

---

With Git 2.29 (Q4 2020), " git for-each-ref " ^{( man )} and friends that list refs used to allow only one --merged or --no-merged to filter them; they learned to take combination of both kind of filtering.

See commit b59cdff , commit a1b19aa (18 Sep 2020), and commit 21bf933 , commit 415af72 , commit b775d81 (15 Sep 2020) by Aaron Lipman ( alipman88 ) .
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 26a3728 , 22 Sep 2020)}

ref-filter : allow merged and no-merged filters

^{Signed-off-by: Aaron Lipman}

Enable ref-filter to process multiple merged and no-merged filters, and extend functionality to git branch ^{( man )} , git tag git ^{( man )} and for-each-ref .
This provides an easy way to check for branches that are "graduation candidates:

 $ git branch --no-merged master --merged next

If passed more than one merged (or more than one no-merged ) filter, refs must be reachable from any one of the merged commits, and reachable from none of the no-merged commits.

filters now includes in its man page :

When combining multiple --merged and --no-merged filters, only references that are reachable from at least one of the --merged commits and from none of the --no-merged commits are shown.

Note: the same Git 2.29 (Q4 2020) adds an hotfix.

See commit 5336d50 (26 Sep 2020) by René Scharfe ( rscharfe ) .
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 03b0198 , 04 Oct 2020)}

ref-filter : plug memory leak in reach_filter()

^{Signed-off-by: René Scharfe}

21bf933928 (" ref-filter : allow merged and no-merged filters", 2020-09-15, Git v2.29.0 -- merge listed in batch #16 ) added an early return to reach_filter() .
Avoid leaking the memory of a then unused array by postponing its allocation until we know we need it.