When i’m hacking on open source libs i maintain, i often have to clean up the commits of people’s prs. I wanna give attribution for good contributions and not have my name associated with nasty hacks, so when i interactively rebase commits i want to make sure the new commit(s) has the right author.

By default when you interactively rebase, git will say you’re the author. So you need to explicitly set this otherwise.

git commit -a -m 'some shit (fixes #99) --author="rza <[email protected]>"'

But getting that author info is a little annoying, involving logging the old commit(s), then copying and pasting the author info. So I wrote git author sha.

git author HEAD writes rza <[email protected]>.

Now I can do:

git commit -a -m 'some shit (fixes #99) --author="$(git author sha)"

Here’s git author in my .gitconfig:

[alias]
  author = "!sh -c 'echo $(git log -1 --format=\"%an <%ae>\" $@) | tr -d \"\\n\"'" -"'"