Never use `git branch` in a script without doing this!

I like automating commands that I run often, and one of my favorite command line tools to use when automating scripts involving selection is FZF.

A very common task I do is create PR based on another git branch, or it's more advanced version: create a PR based on a Jira ticket, as I published in a previous post.

Here's a simple example using FZF and Github CLI:

gh pr create --base "$(git branch | fzf)" --draft --title "[DRAFT] Feature XYZ"

Cool, right?! In this example the branch I select is likely going to be some integration branch different than my current branch and everything should work fine.

But what happens when I need to use the current branch name in a script? For example, let's say you are trying to push the current branch to a different remote branch¹.

Easy! Let's use git branch and pipe it into fzf as before, right?

git push $(git branch | fzf):some-remote-branch

Not so fast, cowboy! It's easy to forget that, but git branch is a CLI command with output intended for humans, not scripts. Let's review again what happens if we call git branch:

  develop
* XYZ-123-smtp-client
  ABC-456-shopify-api

In this example git is trying to be helpful by showing you which branch is the current one with the * character. Unfortunately, * is also a meaningful character which is parsed by git as a wildcard 🙀. So if you ran this command above, and selected the current branch this is going to be the actual command:

git push * XYZ-123-smtp-client:some-remote-branch

Which git then translates to "all local branches":

git push develop ABC-456-shopify-api XYZ-123-smtp-client XYZ-123-smtp-client:some-remote-branch

Yikes! This means that your local copy of ABC-456-shopify-api, XYZ-123-smtp-client and develop (stale / with any changes they have over the remote) will be unintentionally pushed to their default upstream branch as well!

And that's only if you have 2 stale branches locally, what if you have more?!²

The reason I didn't catch this for many years has been because I usually needed to grab the name of another branch.

Thankfully git branch has a --format option that allows returning just the branch names with no "current" indicator:

git branch --format='%(refname:short)'

Next time you use git branch in a script remember to use the --format flag to avoid a mess!