How to cherry-pick a branch using git

Git has a command called cherry-pick, it permits to copy an existing commit to a different branch - it’s very useful.

Lately, I needed to cherry-pick all the commits existing on a certain branch - merging or rebasing the branch was not an option.
Surprisingly, this use case is not supported.

It is possible to cherry-pick a range of commits, though.

git cherry-pick start..end

So we can split the problem into smaller pieces.

Find the first commit of a branch

Here, I am assuming the branch started from master, but it works with other branches as well.

git merge-base master <branch>

Find last commit of a branch

In this case, git log does already a pretty good job:

git log -n 1 <branch> --pretty=format:"%H"

Put it all together

Once we now the first, and last commit of the branch, we can use cherry-pick to re-apply all the commits in this range.

git cherry-pick $(git merge-base master <branch>)..$(git log -n 1 <branch> --pretty=format:"%H")