Git Bisect

Today I discovered a git bisect while reading the comments threads of this Hacker news post, The command uses a binary search algorithm to find which commit in your project history introduced a bug.

Lets image that you discover a regression in your current branch state, and you want to know which commit introduce the culprit change

git bisect start  # initialize the algorithm

git bisect bad    # marks the current commit as buggy 

git bisect selects a commit in the middle of your range history, check it out and outs something like

Bisecting: 675 revisions left to test after this (roughly 10 steps)

then you compile & test your checked version and if the bug is not there mark the commit as good git bisect good otherwhise git bisect bad

Eventually there will be no more revisions left to inspect and the command will print out a description of the first bad commit and the reference refs/bisect/bad will point a at that commit