Having covered the “basic” commands in my previous post, I wanted to look at some of the more advanced stuff. I’m basically meaning things we probably won’t use as regularly as the previous post’s commands.

Rebasing

Rebasing isn’t necessarily advanced in it’s basic form but I’ve not had any real use for it so far apart from in more complicated scenarios.

Rebasing allows us to apply commits from, for example one branch, onto another branch. For example, let’s say we created a branch off of the wrong branch and so want to move commits from the incorrect branch onto the other branch.

So let’s assume we have feature/mybranch and we need to rebase it onto correct_branch, then we use

git rebase --onto correct_branch feature/mybranch 
git force push

Staging parts of a file

Git allows us to stage whole files/folders as well as parts of a file. For example, maybe we’ve made several changes, but we currently only want to stage a subset of these changes. We can use

git add --patch filename

// or short form

git add --p filename

We’ll now be presented with a list of the new lines and a lot of options. Selecting ? will list what each of the options means.

We can use commands such as e to edit the patch diff file, allowing us to delete lines etc. that are to be staged.

I’ll be adding further “advanced” situations/commands and when I need them.