Git: Interactively rebase a range of commits

Question

I'm trying to rebase -i a few commits that occurred a while back in my history. Say I have a log like this:

* 5e32fb0 (HEAD -> master) Add latest feature
* 106c31a Add new feature
* 2bdac33 Add great feature
...100 other commits...
* 64bd9e7 Add test 3
* 3e1066e Add test 2
* 26c612d Add test 1
* 694bdda Initialize repo

and I want to squash the 3 test commits. In these circumstances, git rebase -i HEAD~106 isn't very practical. What I'm looking for instead is something like git rebase -i 64bd9e7:26c612d.

Does git have this sort of behaviour, and if so, how can I use it?

I had a look at this post, but it didn't answer my question.

Answer 1

You say "git rebase -i HEAD~106 isn't very practical".

If you mean that the resultant script file is >100 lines long, it's not great, but it'll work.

If you mean that it's tedious to count back, to work out that you need the 106 commits - as sometimes happens to me, then there is a solution.

You need the hash of the parent of the earliest commit you want, then you can do:

git rebase -i <parent-hash> my-branch

Or you can do

git rebase -i <parent-hash> HEAD

which afterwards will leave you on a detached head that you can do what you want with.

So in your example, you could have done

git rebase -i 694bdda HEAD

(But I would still agree with the other comments, about whether you really want to be changing things that far back. I think it's a bit of a code smell, when I find myself doing it. It's unusual for me to have such a long branch without pushing/sharing it. I'd make a backup branch to test it on, too.)