Commit ancestry chain rev revn etc.

suggest change

$ git reset --hard HEAD^             # discard last commit
$ git rebase --interactive HEAD~5    # rebase last 4 commits

A suffix ^ to a revision parameter means the first parent of that commit object. ^<n> means the <n>-th parent (i.e. <rev>^ is equivalent to <rev>^1).

A suffix ~<n> to a revision parameter means the commit object that is the <n>-th generation ancestor of the named commit object, following only the first parents. This means that for example <rev>~3 is equivalent to <rev>^^^. As a shortcut, <rev>~ means <rev>~1, and is equivalent to <rev>^1, or <rev>^ in short.

This syntax is composable.

To find such symbolic names you can use the git name-rev command:

$ git name-rev 33db5f4d9027a10e477ccf054b2c1ab94f74c85a
33db5f4d9027a10e477ccf054b2c1ab94f74c85a tags/v0.99~940

Note that --pretty=oneline and not --oneline must be used in the following example

$ git log --pretty=oneline | git name-rev --stdin --name-only
master Sixth batch of topics for 2.10
master~1 Merge branch 'ls/p4-tmp-refs'
master~2 Merge branch 'js/am-call-theirs-theirs-in-fallback-3way'
[...]
master~14^2 sideband.c: small optimization of strbuf usage
master~16^2 connect: read $GIT_SSH_COMMAND from config file
[...]
master~22^2~1 t7810-grep.sh: fix a whitespace inconsistency
master~22^2~2 t7810-grep.sh: fix duplicated test name

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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