Prints out a list of hashes from the master branch and their distance from the current HEAD. This is useful for finding the fork point of a tree dump you may have received via email or similar. Relies on the porcelain command diff-tree so expect it to break in future.

git-closest-tree.sh

#!/bin/bash

HASHES=$(git rev-list master)
HASHES=($HASHES)
for HASH in "${HASHES[@]}"
do
  STATS=($(git diff-tree --minimal --shortstat -w HEAD $HASH))
  echo "$HASH => ${STATS[0]} files changed, $((${STATS[3]}+${STATS[5]})) lines changed (+${STATS[3]}/-${STATS[5]})"
done