Pipes in a Git alias?

Question

I work on feature branches that have annoying big names, so I often end up grepping my current branch name when I need to push up to the feature branch from my local feature branch, like so:

git branch | grep '*' | sed 's/* //' | xargs git push origin 

This works fine. I want to make this an alias, so I did this in ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]    pushcur = branch | grep '*' | sed 's/* //' | xargs git push origin 

Now, when I run git pushcur, I get the following error:

usage: git branch [options] [-r | -a] [--merged | --no-merged] 

Leading me to believe that the alias is not properly parsing the pipes. Is there something else I should do to achieve the desired alias?

Answer 1

I don't think you can, but you can prefix it with an ! to treat the command as a new shell command

[alias]     pushcur = ! git branch | grep '*' … 

Answer 2

I typically make small git- scripts and put them in a directory that's in my path (~/.local/bin). Check out git-extras for a bunch of good examples.