You always want your copy of remote in your local repository up-to-date. Having a bunch of git repos doesn't help because now you have to check them all (20+ amiright?!). A small portion of my busy-work goes into fetching and rebasing before I start to work on any project.

So I wrote a small bash script which includes stuff that I learned about bash flags previous, and merged it into one script that does something fairly neat:

• It goes through each git repository in ~/git directory (you can change this to another directory with the -d flag)
• git fetch
• Attempts to do a git rebase origin/{current_branch}
• If it fails, it'll try a git stash to remove any files that are still a work-in-progress
• Attempts a git rebase once again
• Executes git stash pop regardless if it was successful or not

Also note, that you can change your remote from origin to something else with the -r flag. Although, you should note that this will the remote used in all git repos.

You can find the code in the snippet below, but the most up-to-date version can always be found on GitHub.

#!/bin/bash

# Default git directory
git_dir=~/git
# Default remote
git_remote="origin"

function helpmenu {
  echo "USAGE EXAMPLE:"
  echo "    fetch-all.sh ~/directory_of_git_repos origin"
}

function setDir {
  if [[ $checkDir != "" ]]; then
    # Path is passed as first argument
    ls $checkDir 1>&2
    if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
      # Path isn't valid
      echo "Cannot access $1: No such directory"
        exit
    fi
      git_dir=$checkDir
  fi
}

function setRemote {
  if [[ $checkRemote != "" ]]; then
    # Second argument is not empty
    # (Should contain a branch)
    git_remote=$checkRemote
  fi
}

while getopts "hd:r:" OPTION
do
  case $OPTION in
    h)
      helpmenu
      exit
      ;;
    d)
      checkDir=$OPTARG
      setDir
      # break
      ;;
    r)
      checkRemote=$OPTARG
      setRemote
      # break
      ;;
    \?)
      helpmenu
      exit
      ;;
  esac
done

echo "Changing directory to $git_dir"
cd $git_dir

for dir in */; do
  echo "=========================================="
  echo $dir
  cd $dir
  echo "---"
  echo "git fetch"
  git fetch
  echo "---"
  echo "git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD"
  current_branch=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
  echo "current_branch = $current_branch"
  echo "---"
  echo "git rebase $git_remote/$current_branch"
  git rebase $git_remote/$current_branch
  if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
    echo "---"
    echo "git stash"
    git stash
    echo "---"
    echo "git rebase $git_remote/$current_branch"
    git rebase $git_remote/$current_branch
    second_attempt=$?
    echo "---"
    echo "git stash pop"
    git stash pop
  fi
  if [[ second_attempt == 1 ]]; then
    echo "Your repo ($dir.git) has problems.."
  fi
  echo "---"
  echo "cd .."
  cd ..
done;

Refs:

• Git Status From Outside of the Working Directory