Getting status of a different branch in git

Question

I have a git repository that contains two branches, master and experiments. The latter contains experiments that do not belong in branch master, but may later be merged so I'd like to keep it up to date with changes made to master.

To do so, I run git fetch (from any branch), then have to checkout to master to run git status (and possibly git whatchanged) and know whether I need/want to update master from the remote (and merge it to experiments).

Did I miss a git command/option to get the status of master (ie, whether or not fetch downloaded commits to master that need to be merged, and what commits were downloaded) without having to change branch first?

you can use [git scripts](https://github.com/jwiegley/git-scripts) for getting status of branch — Himanshu, Mar 28 '18 at 10:02

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 28 '18 at 09:18

5

git status gives you the status of your working tree and not a single branch.

If you want to see whether master is ahead of experiments, you can do a diff between the two branches or do a log from one of them to see if it covers the other.

answered Mar 28 '18 at 09:18

Noufal Ibrahim

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Thanks, I settled for `git log ..origin/master`. – Aimery Mar 28 '18 at 15:27

Getting status of a different branch in git

1 Answers1