Goal

The method for getting the Git object ID described in previous post in this series isn’t quick enough since it consists of several commands.

The one-line command

Objects with known Git ID

$ (printf "{obj_type} $(git cat-file -s {hash})\0" && git cat-file {obj_type} {h
ash}) | shasum

• {obj_type} can be blob, tree, commit or tag.
• {hash} is the SHA-1 hash of the object.

Then the output SHA-1 hash should be the same as the input {hash}.

Predict Git object IDs

Hence, we can modify the above command to predict the Git object ID of a {file}.

$ (printf "{obj_type} $(wc -c {file} | tr -dc '0-9')\0" && cat {file}) | shasum

In order to verify the result for files, one can quickly get the blob ID from Git by git log -1 -p -- {file}.

Facts learnt

Extract numbers from a string in bash

I typed “linux extract number” on Google, and the autocompletion gave me “from string”. I finally saw two commands for doing this.

1. sed 's/[^0-9]//g'
2. tr -dc '0-9'

In my opinion, the later is simpler. The -c flag takes the complement of the characters marked by -d.

Using cat on M$ Win*

Using the command in the section “Predict Git object IDs” gives users a wrong SHA-1 sum. The reason is that M$ Win* uses \r\n instead of \n for starting newlines. This also results in the incorrect byte count of the files with \r\n as the line terminator in that command. Thus, the extra \r needs to be deleted with tr -d '\r'.

Using Git for Win*

For the installed version of Git on M$ Win*, one needs to use sha1sum instead of shasum. Otherwise, Git Bash will complain that it is “Unable to find Digest::SHA or Digest::SHA::PurePerl”.

Using GitPortable on M$ Win*

Since one can’t even issue the command sha1sum, use openssl sha1 instead. (Omitting the trailing 1 will result in a very different hexadecimal number.)