find git commits with no author

Question

Through use of an import tool I have ended up with some git commits that have no author. For example here is a git log output showing an authorless commit and a normal commit

commit 40c2638378b33ac98a8d9570552ecd01e38174be
Merge: c2c068f 8f0c30c

    Merge libde265 (1.0.2-2) import into refs/heads/workingbranch

commit c2c068f30652fd3e63b55c509ae50828c98daa22
Author: Debian Multimedia Maintainers <pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Date:   Mon Jan 11 18:12:19 2016 +0000

     ffmpeg_2.9


     Gbp-Pq: Name ffmpeg_2.9.patch

github will not accept these commits. So I need to fix them up, to do that I need to find them.

How can I find such commits so that I can fix them?

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

2

You may utilize --pretty format to output full commits line-by-line.

git log --pretty=format:"%h%x09%an%x09%ad%x09%s"

Then from the output can check what commits have corresponding empty author (ie second column).

edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

Community

1
1

answered Dec 22 '16 at 03:46

artm

17,291
6
38
54

This will spit out all commits without an author: git log --pretty="%aN END-AUTHOR %H" | grep '^ END-AUTHOR ' – G. Sylvie Davies Dec 22 '16 at 07:23

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:08

Well I found a soloution but it's a bit hacky.

git log > log1
git log --author "" > log2
diff -u log1 log2

For posterity the complete find and fix script (thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/28845565/5083516 for some hints on the fixup side)

 #!/bin/bash -ev
 rm -f loggood
 rm -f logall
 for TAG in $(git tag) ; do
     git log --pretty=format:"%H" --author="" $TAG >> loggood
     #git log doesn't seem to add a final newline, add one ourselves
     echo >> loggood
     git log --pretty=format:"%H" $TAG >> logall
     echo >> logall
 done

 LC_ALL=C cat loggood | sort | uniq | sponge loggood
 LC_ALL=C cat logall | sort | uniq | sponge logall
 LC_ALL=C comm -13 loggood logall > logbad

 for COMMIT in $(cat logbad) ; do
     git checkout $COMMIT
     git commit --amend --reset-author --no-edit
     git replace $COMMIT $(git log --pretty=format:"%H" -n 1)
 done

 git filter-branch -f -- --all

 for COMMIT in $(cat logbad) ; do
     git replace -d $COMMIT
 done

You can do the same thing with `git rev-list`, which merely prints the commit IDs. However, given that the repository was created by an export/import tool, it might be simpler to re-export it with a corrected tool, or run it through `git-fast-import` with something that corrects these. — torek, Dec 22 '16 at 05:20

find git commits with no author

2 Answers2