Using Git, show all commits that exist *only* on one specific branch, and not *any* others

Question

Given a branch, I'd like to see a list of commits that exist only on that branch. In this question we discuss ways to see which commits are on one branch but not one or more specified other branches.

This is slightly different. I'd like to see which commits are on one branch but not on any other branches.

The use case is in a branching strategy where some branches should only be merged to, and never committed directly on. This would be used to check if any commits have been made directly on a "merge-only" branch.

EDIT: Below are steps to set up a dummy git repo to test:

git init echo foo1 >> foo.txt git add foo.txt git commit -am "initial valid commit" git checkout -b merge-only echo bar >> bar.txt git add bar.txt git commit -am "bad commit directly on merge-only" git checkout master echo foo2 >> foo.txt  git commit -am "2nd valid commit on master" git checkout merge-only  git merge master 

Only the commit with message "bad commit directly on merge-only", which was made directly on the merge-only branch, should show up.

Answer 1

We just found this elegant solution

git log --first-parent --no-merges 

In your example of course the initial commit still shows up.

this answer does not exactly answer the question, because the initial commit still shows up. On the other hand many people coming here seem to find the answer they are looking for.

Answer 2

Courtesy of my dear friend Redmumba:

git log --no-merges origin/merge-only \     --not $(git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/remotes/origin |     grep -Fv refs/remotes/origin/merge-only) 

...where origin/merge-only is your remote merge-only branch name. If working on a local-only git repo, substitute refs/remotes/origin with refs/heads, and substitute remote branch name origin/merge-only with local branch name merge-only, i.e.:

git log --no-merges merge-only \     --not $(git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/heads |     grep -Fv refs/heads/merge-only)