Show top n most active committers in a git repository

Question

I use git shortlog -s -n --all to show all the contributors in a git repository.

 18756  Someone   
  6604  Someone Else  
  6025  Etc     
  5503  Another Committer     
  5217  And So On

I wonder if there is an option to show first n contributors. For example:

git shortlog -s -n --all --some-option 3

And the output will be:

18756  Someone   
 6604  Someone Else  
 6025  Etc     

A solution would be use Unix pipes and head:

git shortlog -s -n --all | head -3

...but if there is a built-in

Answer 1

There isn't a way of doing this with the native git shortlog command. It's usually used to generate a contributors list between releases rather than a top n statistic.

Your approach of using pipes is likely to be the most efficient way of solving the problem; you could also use a script or git alias to do the same thing.