5 Advanced Git Commands to Level-Up Your Coding Skills

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Python in Plain English

2 min readNov 2, 2020

Top 5 Advanced Git commands which make a programmer’s life easy.

Git is a widely used version control system. This tutorial will help you to understand 5 Advanced Git commands like git squash, cherry-pick.

1. Squash multiple Git commits into one

check how many commits you want to squash.

git log -<n>

rebase head with particular commit.

git rebase -i HEAD~<n>

change n-1 commit from pick to squash(s).
save file and again add commit message.
force push head branch

git push -f origin head

2. Amend a new commit in the last commit

amend new changes in the last commit

git commit --amend
git push -u origin head

3. Cherry-pick

Cherry-picking in Git means to choose a commit from one branch and apply it to another.
Make sure you are on the branch you want to apply the commit to.

git checkout master

Execute the following:

git cherry-pick <commit-hash>

4. Clone a subfolder from the git repo

git init <repo>
cd <repo>
git remote add -f origin <url>git config core.sparseCheckout trueecho "some/dir/" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
echo "another/sub/tree" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
This tells git which directories you want to checkout. Then you can pull just those directoriesgit pull origin master

5. Take pull from an upstream forked repository.

git remote add upstream <git@url>
git fetch upstream
git checkout master
git rebase upstream/master
git push -f origin master

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