git cherry

Used to detect what you've already cherry-picked upstream.

🎯 What & why

git cherry tells you which commits on your branch are NOT yet in upstream, marking with '+' the ones still missing and '-' the ones whose patch-id is already there (typically because they were cherry-picked or rebased upstream).

🧠 Mental model

It's a patch-id comparison: same diff content => same commit, even with different SHAs. Pairs naturally with git patch-id under the hood.

🛠️ Synopsis

git cherry [-v] [--abbrev[=<n>]] [<upstream> [<head> [<limit>]]]

🎚️ Switches & options

Flag	What it does
`<upstream>`	Branch you're comparing against; default is the upstream of HEAD.
`<head>`	Branch whose commits to classify; defaults to HEAD.
`<limit>`	Stop walking before this commit (exclusive).
`-v`	Verbose: also print the commit subject after each marker.
`--abbrev[=<n>]`	Show abbreviated SHAs of length <n> instead of full 40 chars.

💡 Use cases

Before a force-push: confirm which of your local commits are truly new vs already upstream.
Audit a long-lived feature branch after upstream cherry-picked some of your commits.
Pre-flight a rebase to know which commits will be skipped as duplicates.
Generate a list of 'still pending' commits for a release-notes blurb.

🧪 Examples

Default check vs upstream

git cherry -v

Compare topic vs main

git cherry -v main topic

Short SHAs in output

git cherry -v --abbrev=8 main

Limit how far back to walk

git cherry main topic v1.2.0

🎓 Recommendations

Always use -v; the bare markers are useless without subjects.
Run it before 'git rebase' onto a branch that may already contain your patches.
Trust the '-' marker: it means the patch content is upstream, even if the SHA differs.

🪤 Common pitfalls

Patch-id ignores commit message and parent; merges and trivially-different patches can mis-classify.
Order of arguments matters: <upstream> first, then <head>. Reversing flips the meaning.
Empty commits and pure-merge commits don't have a meaningful patch-id and are filtered.

🔗 Related modules

📝 Quiz

Hit each option, then Check answers. Score is recorded; Next is always open.