This is a simple shell script to extract commits by a specified author in a git repository and format them as numbered patches. It is useful for GSoC code submission.

git_extract_commits.sh

if ! [[ $# -eq 1 || $# -eq 2 || $# -eq 4 ]]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 <author> [<start_date> <end_date>] [output_dir]"
  echo "Example: $0 xinan@me.com 2015-05-25 2015-08-21 ./patches"
  exit
fi

author=$1

if [ $# -gt 3 ]; then
  output_dir=$4
elif [ $# -eq 2 ]; then
  output_dir=$2
else
  output_dir="./"
fi

if [ $# -gt 2 ]; then
  start=$2
  end=$3
else
  start="2015-05-25"
  end="2015-08-21"
fi

counter=0
for i in `git log --author=$author --since=$start --until=$end --pretty=oneline | sed 's/ .*//' | tail -r`
do
  counter=$((counter+1))
  git format-patch -M -C -1 --start-number $counter $i -o $output_dir
done

Thanks for this script.

tail -r works only on BSD, for GNU/Linux tac can be used instead.

@haaHh Thanks for the info! I didn't know that. Learnt something 😄

my author name had spaces so that was an issue, fixed with double quotes on author attribute in 'git log'

@yousefhamza Oh I did not consider that 😅 You can always use email address as author by the way.

@xinan Thanks for this. Very helpful!