In some (very) rare occasions, I make some changes in my repository that are so self-explanatory that a commit message describing my intentions is somewhat useless. In these cases, I would like the commit message to basically just list what files I've added/removed/edited. For instance:
Added 'dog.h', 'cat.h'
A manual commit message would look like
Added header files
In situations like this it would be nice to not have to actually write the commit message, but rather have it automatically generated.
I'm aware that this is very bad practice, but I would only use this for non-professional repositories used for private projects. I know it's lazy, but I'm curious as to how it can be done. Unix shell scripts are preferred, but any solution is welcome.
Q: Is there a way to automatically generate a git commit message, listing what files that has been changed?
If you are really that lazy you may just use the following. In brief, it does a git status, extract lines for new files, deleted, renamed and modified, and pass it to git commit
# LANG=C.UTF-8 or any UTF-8 English locale supported by your OS may be used
LANG=C git -c color.status=false status \
| sed -n -r -e '1,/Changes to be committed:/ d' \
-e '1,1 d' \
-e '/^Untracked files:/,$ d' \
-e 's/^\s*//' \
-e '/./p' \
| git commit -F -
Tweak the sed part to customize how you want the message to be generated base on result of git status
Alias it to something short, or save it as a script (e.g. git-qcommit) so that you can use it as git qcommit
A sample message from git log
adrianshum:~/workspace/foo-git (master) $ git log
commit 78dfe945e8ad6421b4be74cbb8a00deb21477437
Author: adrianshum <foo@bar.com>
Date: Wed Jan 27 01:53:45 2016 +0000
renamed: bar.txt -> bar2.txt
modified: foo.txt
Edited:
Changed original grep to sed to make the commit message generation logic more generic by including lines between Changes to be committed and Untracked files, and produce a slightly better looking commit message)