How to run command on all git repositories on a machine?

Question

Based on this question I came up with this command to find out all .git repositories on my machine.

find / -type d -name .git 2>&-

And it works relatively fast. Though I hear my CPU's fan a little, which shows that my machine does some work.

Now I want to be able to loop over the results and run git commands on each of them. For example, I want to get their status to see what should be managed.

I tried:

find / -type d -name .git 2>&- | xargs git status

But it didn't work:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

I also tried:

find / -type d -name .git 2>&- | xargs dirname | xargs git status

Again, the same error.

What command should I use?

You need to write a script that can differentiate bare and non bare repos and run the appropriate command in the right directory — Mad Physicist, Jul 09 '21 at 04:55
@MadPhysicist, that's not important to me. My loop doesn't work. — Hossein Fallah, Jul 09 '21 at 05:00
Because you can't run in the git folder of a non bare repo and you can't run in the parent folder of a bare one. Hence the need for a script — Mad Physicist, Jul 09 '21 at 05:06
If that's the difference, then I would turn it into a script as you said. But in my case, all are the same (either bare or non-bare I don't know). My current problem is that my loop is not working. I can't loop over them. — Hossein Fallah, Jul 09 '21 at 05:09

LeGEC · Answer 1 · 2021-07-09T09:12:11.800

Your issue is simply : suppose your cwd is $HOME, and your repository is in $HOME/my/repo,
git status $HOME/my/repo will not look for a git repository stored in my/repo, it will search for a repository starting from $HOME and going upwards (and it probably won't find one).

There are several ways to fix this :

cd to target directory before running git status :
```
cd <path/to/repo>; git status
```
name the target .git repository using git -C :
```
git -C <path/to/repo> status
```

To combine your find command with xargs :

use dirname to turn /path/to/repo/.git into /path/to/repo,
use xargs -i to allow to place the argument somewhere else than "the last position" :

find . -name .git | xargs dirname | xargs -i git -C {} status

# or :
find . -name .git | xargs dirname |\
    xargs -i bash -c "echo ===== {}; git -C {} status"

I initially posted an answer saying "only set `GIT_DIR`", but you actually also need to set `GIT_WORK_TREE`. `git -C path/to/repo` is more convenient (it sets "both"). — LeGEC, Jul 09 '21 at 09:10

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 09 '21 at 07:34

You can also try and use dirk-thomas/vcstool (python-based)

Vcstool is a version control system (VCS) tool, designed to make working with multiple repositories easier.

vcs status /path/to/several/repos /path/to/other/repos /path/to/single/repo

Other approach (shell-based): sascha-andres/devenv

devenv is a tool to manage projects containing multiple git repositories. > With a config you can setup all repositories with one command and even work with the local repositories as if they where one ( eg creating branches in all referenced projects) using the shell.

Biffen · Answer 3 · 2021-07-09T08:52:58.210

I use this:

find . \
  -type d \
  -exec sh -c '[ -e "$1/.git" ]' - {} \; \
  -prune \
  -exec git -C {} status \;

It:

isn’t very fast.
will skip nested repositories (e.g. submodules).
works with work trees, but not bare repositories.

Here’s an alternative that should work with bare repositories:

find . \
  -type d \
  -exec sh -c 'git -C "$1" rev-parse --git-dir >/dev/null 2>&1' - {} \; \
  -prune \
  -exec git -C {} status \;

How to run command on all git repositories on a machine?

3 Answers3