oliverdavies.uk/content/node.eb1fecb1-6d0c-413a-b546-2c2fcf320d94.yml

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title:
  - value: 'Which commit has the largest message?'
created:
  - value: '2024-05-21T00:00:00+00:00'
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      <p><a href="/daily/2024/05/17/why-i-dont-commit-with--m">I write and advocate for others to write</a> detailed Git commit messages within the subject body to provide context and information about why the commit was needed, what other options were considered, any consequences or knock-on effects there could be, or even code snippets or pseudo code.</p>

      <p>Recently, I was curious to know which commit in a repository has the longest commit message, what code has changed in that commit, and who wrote it.</p>

      <p>I was hoping for a command like <code>git shortlog --summary --all</code> (which shows all authors to a codebase and their number of commits), but couldn't find one, so <a href="https://github.com/opdavies/git-commit-length-counter">I wrote a script to do it</a>.</p>

      <p>It's a bash script that loops over the commits in the repo, calculates the length of each message, sorts them and shows the commit with longest message.</p>

      <p>It was an interesting task and shows examples of using various UNIX commands and Linux coreutils, such as <code>find</code>, <code>cut</code>, <code>sort</code> and <code>wc</code> in combination with Git.</p>

      <p>The longest in this website's code base is <a href="https://github.com/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk-drupal/commit/cbd1417b24a608df8b451a3ab5c9f888de41e758">546 characters</a>, which is fairly small compared to some of my messages in other projects.</p>

      <p>What's the longest commit message in the repository you're working in?</p>

              
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    processed: |
      <p><a href="/daily/2024/05/17/why-i-dont-commit-with--m">I write and advocate for others to write</a> detailed Git commit messages within the subject body to provide context and information about why the commit was needed, what other options were considered, any consequences or knock-on effects there could be, or even code snippets or pseudo code.</p>

      <p>Recently, I was curious to know which commit in a repository has the longest commit message, what code has changed in that commit, and who wrote it.</p>

      <p>I was hoping for a command like <code>git shortlog --summary --all</code> (which shows all authors to a codebase and their number of commits), but couldn't find one, so <a href="https://github.com/opdavies/git-commit-length-counter">I wrote a script to do it</a>.</p>

      <p>It's a bash script that loops over the commits in the repo, calculates the length of each message, sorts them and shows the commit with longest message.</p>

      <p>It was an interesting task and shows examples of using various UNIX commands and Linux coreutils, such as <code>find</code>, <code>cut</code>, <code>sort</code> and <code>wc</code> in combination with Git.</p>

      <p>The longest in this website's code base is <a href="https://github.com/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk-drupal/commit/cbd1417b24a608df8b451a3ab5c9f888de41e758">546 characters</a>, which is fairly small compared to some of my messages in other projects.</p>

      <p>What's the longest commit message in the repository you're working in?</p>

              
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