How do I find the next commit in git? (child/children of ref)

git rev-list --ancestry-path commit1..commit2

I set commit1 as the current commit and commit2 to the current head, and this returns a list of all commits which build a path between commit1 and commit2.

The last line of the output is the child of commit1 (on the path to commit2).

To list all the commits, starting from the current one, and then its child, and so on - basically standard git log, but going the other way in time, use something like

git log --reverse --ancestry-path 894e8b4e93d8f3^..master

where 894e8b4e93d8f3 is the first commit you want to show.

The creator of Hudson (now Jenkins), Kohsuke Kawaguchi published (November 2013): kohsuke / git-children-of:

Given a commit, find immediate children of that commit.

#!/bin/bash -e
# given a commit, find immediate children of that commit.
for arg in "$@"; do
  for commit in $(git rev-parse $arg^0); do
    for child in $(git log --format='%H %P' --all | grep -F " $commit" | cut -f1 -d' '); do
      git describe $child
    done
  done
done

---

As illustrated by this thread, in a VCS based on history represented by a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), there is not "one parent" or "one child".

        C1 -> C2 -> C3
      /               \
A -> B                  E -> F
      \               /
        D1 -> D2 ----/

The ordering of commits is done by "topo-order" or "date-order" (see the GitPro book).

But since Git 1.6.0, you can list the children of a commit.

git rev-list --children
git log --children

---

Note: for parent commits, you have the same issue, with the suffix ^ to a revision parameter meaning the first parent of that commit object. ^<n> means the <n>th parent (i.e. rev^ is equivalent to rev^1).

If you are on branch foo and issue "git merge bar" then foo will be the first parent.
I.e.: The first parent is the branch you were on when you merged, and the second is the commit on the branch that you merged in.