What’s the easiest way to use the output paths from a git command in a subsequent git command?

I far too frequently use the mouse to do things like this:

/home/me-$ git log --name-status -1  
commit a10e63af1f4b1b2c28055fed55d4f2bb3225a541
Author: Me <[e-mail]>
Date:   Tue Aug 18 13:04:04 2015 -0400

    XYZ-376 make ctors public

M       x/y/z/Class1.java
M       x/y/z/Class2.java

/home/me-$ git checkout -- x/y/z/Class2.java  # <-- copy/paste with the mouse

I know that some git commands accept wildcards, and this mitigates this problem somewhat, but I’m wondering if there is a way do specifically reference pathspecs, etc. from previous commands.

How can I run commands like this without using the mouse, and without retyping long paths by hand?

Answer

I typically use a subshell ($(<command in subshell here...>)) for this.

For example, sometimes I had many files deleted and I had to git rm every one of them.

There’s the command git ls-files --deleted that returns the names of all the missing files. I can combine it with git rm like this:

git rm $(git ls-files --deleted)

This is somewhat a bad example, because (as I discovered later), this operation can be achieved much easier with git add --all. But I think it illustrates the point.

---

In your case, if you wanted to checkout all files that have been changed in the previous commit, it would be hard to parse the output of git log --name-status, because it contains additional information, but you could use something like git diff HEAD^ --name-only instead.

So:

git checkout $(git diff HEAD^ --name-only)

will do it in your example.

One nice thing that I noticed using the $(...) syntax is that it works both in Bash and in PowerShell.