How to extract string separated by blank spaces in windows command line batch commands

Question

I am trying to read the latest commit for a git remote repository using this command

git ls-remote https://repo.myrepository.com/scm/swc/project.git refs/heads/qa

it works fine and returns me something like this

5261626431661281d788382a1ed6ab1440fd93a8        refs/heads/qa

But I am not able to find online any way to extract only the commit hash from the returned string in command line

So basically I want to extract this string from the output of the command

5261626431661281d788382a1ed6ab1440fd93a8

I thought it would be very easy to find this information online, but the only answer I am finding everywhere is this

git ls-remote https://repo.myrepository.com/scm/swc/project.git refs/heads/qa | \ cut -f 1

But this does not work in windows command line, ofcourse because cut is not windows command.

Can anybody please help for windows command line version of it?

Answer 1

If you are calling this command from C# , you can process the output in C# :

if (lines.Count > 0) {
   sha = lines[0].Substring(0, 40)
}

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I imagine you are working with Windows. If git was installed with the standard windows installer (as opposed to : compiled from source), it actually comes with the standard linux tools (grep, cut, ...).

It just doesn't update the global %PATH% in your system to point at these tools - the main known issue is : there is a standard windows tool named find , which does not behave as linux's find , updating the global %PATH% for everyone would break the scripts that rely on windows' version of find .

One possible way to use them :

• find the directory which contains all the standard linux tools,
• run your Process command with a PATH environment that contains this directory